Apparently, feeling connected to other people is beneficial to humans.
Perhaps it comes from the fact that at a quantum level everything is entangled. Connection and interdependence is the natural state of things.
Connection makes us healthier and happier. It also makes us powerful.
Doesn’t that feel good?
Lifestyle businesses get a bad rap. As if they are not serious. As if they are not real businesses.
In a ‘lifestyle’ business, people make things, or offer their services, for money, that they then use to buy other things which support and enhance their lifestyle – including keeping the business going.
In a ‘proper’ (i.e. capitalist) business, people put money into ventures that will make them more money, that they then use to put into either the same venture or others, that will make them more money. Sometimes the venture is making things that enhance lifestyles, but it doesn’t really matter what it is (smoking, sugary food, addictive medicines) as long as it turns money into more money. Capitalist business is how we’ve got to the mess we’re in.
But it’s lifestyle businesses that get a bad rap.
When in fact they are the original (and best) business type.
They don’t even have to be small. A lifestyle business can support hundreds of people, maybe even thousands.
The point is that they are about life, not money.
Let’s have more lifestyle businesses, I say.
And let’s make them even easier to run for their owners, so they can get bigger and last longer without turning capitalist.
The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged. If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.
The same is true of a physical product or service. Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.
And will be if you are successful.
The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible. Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.
But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable. Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.
Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.
That’s what makes scaling safe.
You don’t have to lose your business to be able to leave it.
You just have to take yourself out of the day-to-day.
To do this, make everyone a boss. Get the music that’s in your head written down so that other people can play it. Give your people the responsibility and the autonomy to deliver your business’s unique customer experience consistently, in their own style.
The sooner you do this, the sooner you get to choose how much time you want to spend in your business, the sooner you free the business to grow and the sooner you’ll free your people to grow too.
Best of all, you get to keep everything that makes your business uniquely yours.
In the end, you’ll have built a community, not just a business. A community centred around the promises you make and keep for the people you serve. A community that becomes your legacy.
The irony is that all this makes it an even more attractive buy.
But of course by then you won’t want to sell.
“In six months, 300 volunteers from 41 countries worked asynchronously to produce a best-selling book. The Carbon Almanac is now in ten languages. The almanac for kids, Generation Carbon is in 17 languages. There are more than 88 podcasts, a photobook, and a daily e-newsletter.” From Fast Company: “Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss, and everyone’s a leader.“
And dozens more spin-offs too. The enterprise is still going strong, and still growing.
The Carbon Almanac was created this way.
With no managers, no boss. Everyone’s a leader.
Maybe that’s also how Stonehenge was built? And Çatalhöyük or Knossos?
Maybe that’s naturally how we build worthwhile things?
Maybe you could take the load off your own shoulders and reframe your small business into something longer-lasting that way?
Making everyone a boss unleashes amazing energy. Especially when you also give them a lovely firm but springy floor to bounce off.*
Discipline makes Daring possible.
*That’s where I can help.
Around 2,000 years ago, someone buried their cash. Did it do them any good that way? Almost certainly not. Could … Read More “Hoarding”
If you make it easy for people to log ideas as they go, you’re more likely to get useful ideas for improvement, because its when they’re actually doing the job that people feel the friction. This could be as simple as a shared google doc, or as fully functional as Slack or Trello. Whatever works for you and your team.
Logging ideas is just the first step of course. The next is to review them. This is where its helpful to have dedicated time set aside. Get everyone together to review, ponder the consequences and choose which ideas to incorporate next.
Then create a schedule for implementing these improvements, seeing how they affect things, and rolling them out or back as a consequence.
If this is starting to look a bit like software development, that’s because in a way it is. Like software, your business is a system – for making and keeping promises.
We’ve learned a lot about how to improve software systems while customers are actually using them. It makes sense to apply that know-how to your Promise System too.
It involves building in good habits of observation, selection and listening to feedback. And like admin, it works best when it is as much as possible a side-effect of doing the job.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
One of the things I love about LHL Fridays is that I always learn something new.
Today Tim Bicknell told me about ‘Level 5 leadership’, so of course I had to google it.
And then I found this in the Harvard Business Review:
“When you look across the good-to-great transformations, they consistently display three forms of discipline: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”
Discipline makes Daring possible.
And you don’t have to wait to be corporate to apply it.
Just talk to me.
Can’t wait to find out more.
I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size. In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.
How can he do that?
Here are some ideas.
First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it. Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues. Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.
Second, let your people manage themselves. After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility. Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though. Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate. Do this and you can ditch the managers.
Next, get rid of ‘admin’. Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time. Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job. Do this and you can ditch the admin department.
Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service. In essence make them a one-person instance of your business. Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.
Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it. Reward must follow responsibility. Ownership must be real. Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
My interest in documenting how things should work came from my years in software development. To me, it always seemed sensible to work out what you wanted your software to do before you built it, or bought it.
And even more sensible that it should reflect the way you do business rather than an average of hundreds of other firms.
Writing a customer Experience Score before you commission software has other benefits too.
It gets everyone thinking about change – ‘how we really want it to work’ rather than simply ‘how we do it now’.
It gets everyone thinking a level up from the day-to-day, about what has to happen when rather than how it happens.
But most of all it gives everyone, including you, the chance to reframe your business from a management hierarchy to an easily replicable system for making and keeping promises.
And the benefits keep coming after you’re done. Once you can demonstrate that your unique system for making and keeping promises works consistently, people will ask you to do more of it for them. And you will find it easy to scale up on delivery.
Like many a human enterprise, the hard work is all up front, but worth it for the dividends flying in later, almost effortlessly.
And isn’t that just what it means to be an entrepreneur?