Jugglers make life difficult for themselves on purpose. For our entertainment. So we can marvel at their coordination and dexterity.
Business owners juggle because they haven’t realised yet that the balls can be self-powered and self-organising.
Or that enabling this is an even more impressive act.
Good Services principle number 9: A good service is consistent. I like this principle particularly, because consistent doesn’t mean uniform. Your services
There is a whole family of stringed musical instruments that capitalise on resonance.
These instruments have additional ‘sympathetic’ strings, that are never touched, but are tuned to resonate in harmony with the normal strings. So when the instrument is played, a richer, more complex harmony of sound is made – almost as if the player has been given an extra hand.
Your Promise of Value is how your business is tuned. Everything you do, for customers; staff; suppliers, shareholders and the community around you needs to resonate with it.
That way, they become ‘sympathetic strings’ for your Promise, extending your reach and helping to make it truly believable.
What is freedom?
That isn’t all we want as humans though. We also crave Purpose – to be doing this for something bigger than ourselves; and Community – to be doing it with like-minded people. And within that community, we also seek Status – to find our place and have others know it.
Gangs, drug rings and terrorist organisations provide these things in spades.
So could work, if we designed it to.
Get a bunch of small business owners together where I live and they’ll wax lyrical about no longer having to commute to London to work. For some it means as much as 15 hours a week to spend on something else – family; sleep; self-care or productive business.
There are good reasons why teams sometimes need to get together to work, but to me at least it seems odd to see bigger and bigger white collar factories go up in London, when most people would be more productive working from home. After all F International cracked how to do this successfully way back in the ’70s – long before the technology we have now made remote working easy.
In which case the need to commute must be about something else. A need for community perhaps? Cross-pollination? Status? Control?
I don’t know the answer, but it might be worth asking the question for your business.
We’re not trained to ask for help. We’re meant to be knowledgeable enough and competent enough to manage everything ourselves. We like to present as swans, serene on top, paddling madly underneath.
Independence is overrated.
Sometimes the quickest and best solution is to ask for help. And your accountant can be a good place to start.
We humans are good at compartmentalising.
We happily shop with a backpack or canvas bag ‘to save plastic’, then collect Disney hero cards or M&S shop miniatures with our groceries.
We install dual flush toilets ‘to save water’, then take 3 showers a day.
We cycle to work ‘to avoid polluting’, then fly abroad for a holiday 4 or 5 times a year.
Compartmentalising allows us to tinker, to make ourselves feel good, when what’s really needed is a paradigm shift.
Good luck to everyone on the Global Climate Strike today.
The thing my mum hated most about her role in our family was that she was the one who nagged us. To tidy our rooms, do our homework or put our clothes in for washing.
Because, as all grown-ups know, getting things in good order doesn’t happen by accident. There is no ‘housework fairy’ that does it all by magic.
There isn’t a book-keeping fairy either. Although many small business owners seem to think there is. There’s only your poor accountant trying to drag the information out of you in time for the deadline, or ploughing through that jumbled bag of receipts you’ve handed in, trying to make sense of them for your tax return.
One of the best things my mum did for us was to go on strike. It helped us grow up and take responsibility for keeping our own order.
Perhaps its time accountants did the same. Because keeping your business in order is far more important than housework. It’s the foundation for growing up.
Those country lanes we love to drive down in summer were mostly built back in the 1920s and 1930s.
They were an investment in the future, both as physical infrastructure that opened up the countryside to new markets and as employment for men and their families who would have otherwise starved.
They have lasted much better than most canals and railways, because they are less prescriptive about what can travel on them, or for what purpose, which means they can cope with all kinds of traffic, from milk-cart, to ramblers to country commuters.
They form a network, combining direction and connection with flexibility. They enable autonomy.
Pretty good characteristics to aim for in a business infrastructure too. Expensive to build, but well worth the investment.
“A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic criteria. … Read More “Good design makes a product useful”