Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Responsible Autonomy

Re-distribution – things to learn from Macaria
June 23, 2020

Re-distribution – things to learn from Macaria

Raphael, the explorer who describes Utopia to Thomas More and his friend, hasn’t only been to Utopia.

“To these things I would add that law among the Macarians – a people that live not far from Utopia – by which their king, on the day on which he began to reign , is ties to an oath, confirmed by solemn sacrifices, never to have at once above a thousand pounds of gold in his treasures, or so much silver as is equal to that in value.   

This law, they tell us, was made by an excellent king who had more regard to the riches of his country than to his own wealth, and therefore provided against the heaping up of so much treasure as might impoverish the people.    He thought that moderate sum might be sufficient for any accident … but that it was not enough to encourage a prince to invade other men’s rights.   He also thought that it was a good provision for that free circulation of money so necessary for the course of commerce and exchange.”

This law is about re-distributing wealth to keep it circulating within an economy, which is where value is generated.

It could equally well apply to responsibility.    Responsbility, distributed and circulated within a business, is able to generate more value than if hoarded at the top.

This isn’t my utopia
June 22, 2020

This isn’t my utopia

The thing I love about reading, is that I’m always finding new ways of saying things, from people who can say them much better than me.

This midsummer weekend, I finally got round to reading the Verso edition of Utopia, by Thomas More.  It was not More’s words that struck me, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s – in fact not always her words, but words she assembled, interpreted and discussed in the first of her essays included with this book: “A non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold place to be”.

“The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relationship is reversed in organisms – organic structure is determined by it’s processes”*

“The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.”**

“Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.”

“Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently Organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided.   But, it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization.”***

I (like Le Guin) found Thomas More’s Utopia unsatisfactory.   It is founded on force and maintained through slavery.   It’s activities are determined by its structure.   It is like most utopias,“the product of ‘the euclidean mind’ (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.”****

Here’s a stab at pulling this all together into something relevant for me as Gibbs & Partners:

  • Most human beings, including business owners, are simply trying to persevere in their existence.
  • Most corporates, built as machines, where structure determines process, are inimical to this.   Which is why people, when they get the chance, retire, or leave and set up their own small businesses, often with no idea of growth, simply as a means of persevering in their existence.
  • What I’m making explicit and to an extent formalising, is an alternative, organic view of a business where process (the making and keeping of promises) determines structure.   An alternative Le Guin might call yin.
  • By formalising this structure,  I’m trying to create a blueprint for documenting the ‘laws’ of a business that enables it to be both a place where people can  persevere in their own existence and a generator of the growth, innovation and profit that will create more spaces for more people to persevere in theirs.  A place where it’s possible to enjoy both freedom and happiness.
  • I’m by no means the only person I know of trying to do something like this.  I’m part of a trend, that recognises the need for humanity to make “a successful adaptation to their environment and learn to live without destroying each other.”****

As Derek Sivers puts it:

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws.  This is your utopia”.

Welcome to mine.

 

*Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.

**Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46-47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28-30. The version here is Le Guin’s own amalgam of the two translations.

***Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.

****Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

Stakeholders
June 18, 2020

Stakeholders

I’ve written before about multiple stakeholders, so I was pleased to hear what Brian Chesky shared about who he considers to be the stakeholders of Airbnb.

Yes, shareholders.    But also employees (who also hold equity), visitors, hosts, suppliers, partners and the communities they operate in.

What particularly struck me was the way Chesky has designed in consideration for each set of stakeholders into the way the business works.  

Here are his recommended first steps for setting up in business:

  1. Define your core values.
  2. Define your principles – the things you believe to be true that other businesses don’t.
  3. Write down all your stakeholders.
  4. Then, for each stakeholder set, define 2 or 3 promises you make to them that you will never break.

I love this!  It means that a business is a system for making and keeping promises – to all its stakeholders.

Sometimes, its impossible to keep all your stakeholders happy, as Airbnb found right at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.  But it seems that for Airbnb, knowing the promises they’ve pledged to keep has helped them to do the right things, in the right way, as far as they can. 

And in the long run, this is what keeps the public wanting you to exist.

*Freeman, R. & Reed, Dl. (1983). Stockholders and Stakeholders: A New Perspective on Corporate Governance. California Management Review. 25. 10.2307/41165018. 

Legacy
June 16, 2020

Legacy

You aren’t going to live forever, but the company you’ve founded might.   And the chances are you’d like it to carry on pretty much as you envisaged it.

As Brian Chesky puts it in another gem from Eric Ries’s Out of The Crisis podcast:

“Design your company so that the wrong person running your company doesn’t ruin your company.”

One way of minimising the risk of this happening is to build it so that it makes and keeps it’s unique Promise of Value purposely, consistently yet creatively, so that even in the wrong hands, it can’t help but deliver the Promise you meant it to.

Another way is to have everyone in the company running it.

It’s hard to hijack everyone.

New paths
June 4, 2020

New paths

It’s easy to talk about ‘a new way of doing things’, a ‘new normal’, but unless we actually make it happen, it’s all too easy to drift back into the old, familiar ways.

So, here are a few of the people I know of, some of whom I know, who are actually doing a new normal.   Showing us that not only is there another way, but that new ways work, often better than the old way:

Some of these people have been doing things their new way for years.

Maybe ‘new’ isn’t so new after all?  Not untried, not unsuccessful,  just unfamiliar.

My workflow problem
June 3, 2020

My workflow problem

I’ve long had a problem with ‘workflow’.   It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve finally worked out why.

Workflow is the application of a pin factory model to service businesses, to professions.   It breaks a process into tiny, individually repetitive steps that can be done faster and faster over time, making the whole process more efficient.

This is great for pins, and was a leap forward when Adam Smith wrote about it in 1776.   Back then, “See a pin, pick it up, then all day you’ll have good luck.” made sense.  A pin was valuable.  You were lucky to find one for free.

Nowadays, we don’t have a shortage of pins, or of other simple things that can be efficiently made using the factory method.   We have made enough garments to clothe the next 4 generations of the entire human race.

We do have a shortage of what’s needed to thrive in the face of enormous  and challenging complexities: empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair.

You can’t make any of those in a pin factory.

Empathetic Magic
June 2, 2020

Empathetic Magic

One way to make rain, is to pour water through a sieve.   The idea is that by imitating something like rain ourselves, real rain will fall.

We call this sympathetic magic, and the more people involved, the better.   If we all ‘make rain’ together, “The Rainmaker” is bound to respond.  This kind of group rainmaking is probably the origin of the myth of the Danaides.

There is a better kind of magic.  Where we all act as if we are the kind of people we’d love to live with.  Seeing our neighbours and fellows as human beings, very like us, yet not us, and all the more interesting for that, even when they are being ‘difficult’.

That’s empathetic magic.   It works.  And the more people involved, the better.

Imagine a country
June 1, 2020

Imagine a country

“Imagine a country. . .

Close your eyes, and put your fingers in your ears and shut out the angry chaos for a moment.     Now take a deep breath and imagine a country you want to live in, a country you wish existed, a country where you’d truly feel at home. . .”

This book is a collection of some of the imaginings.   In 500 to 800 words (or an illustrative alternative) within a month.

It’s well worth a read.  But an even better idea would be to do it.  To share this prompt with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, networks.   Then to discuss those imaginings.   And decide how they can begin to be made real.

I don’t know about you, but several times over the last few years, I’ve wondered about moving.   To a different part of the country, or even to a different country.

This book reminds me that it’s better to improve than move.   And that I am responsible for the home I live in.

 

Bleak House – a never-ending story
May 29, 2020

Bleak House – a never-ending story

The young engineer was sitting, legs dangling into the inspection chamber, looking disgruntled.

“What are you up to?”  I asked him.

“Installing fibre-optic cabling.”

“Ooooh!  Does that mean we’ll be able to get fibre to the home?”

“Yes, eventually.   But I don’t know how long that will be.   There are just so many blockages.”

“Well, it’s old wiring round here isn’t it.” I was thinking metaphorical blockages.

“It’s not that, it’s literally soil, blocking up the conduits.   A pressure washer would clear it, or maybe they’ll have to dig.   I just want to install it, and I can’t.”

Half an hour later, he and his mate have gone, leaving nothing changed apart from a few more spray marks on the ground.

This is at least the second time the installation engineers have been in our street this month.   Each time they’ve been unable to achieve anything, because the process of upgrading the network has been divided up like Adam Smith’s pin factory.   Only where the pin factory contained the whole process, each step involved in this one has been outsourced to a different specialist company, so nobody sees, let alone owns the whole process.

In the old days, you used to see a gang of workmen round a single hole, some of them idle.    Now I know why.   Some of them were there to deal with the unforseen complications that might turn up once the surface was broken.   If a conduit needed clearing, they were there to do it.   And because they all worked for the same company they knew they could do take that responsibility.   That’s called slack, leeway, resilience.    It’s how you keep a complex process on track.

But what we’ve replaced that with is far more wasteful.   At least all the workmen got paid, even if they didn’t get the satisfaction of doing their job.    I wouldn’t be surprised to find those two young men have earned nothing from their work this morning.   They’ll be on piece-work, paid on completion.

Add to that the fact that each specialist company has to make a profit, and allocates its resources to maximise that, who knows when the next favourable conjunction of BT, Openreach and Instalcom will come around?    Our street is still waiting for the gas upgrade that we were told to expect 2 years ago.

Divvying up a coherent process into independent chunks may be profitable for some, but its not efficient.

Why am I reminded of Jarndyce v Jarndyce?