Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Choosing the data
November 2, 2022

Choosing the data

When action takes place without evidence, based on bias and assumption, or merely indifference; seeing incontrovertible facts presented in a compelling format can kickstart a change in behaviour.

That’s what Florence Nightingale achieved when she sent a copy of “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army” to Queen Victoria.

There were undoubtedly many more facts Nightingale could have observed.  The height of patients, their propensity to swear, their educational attainment, their places of birth.

But those facts weren’t what mattered to her.   What mattered was how many were dying unnecessarily.

Data is increasingly easy to collect.   Resist the temptation to use it all.  Decide which facts matter to your business and measure those.

That way you’ll have a better chance of changing the right behaviours.

Keeping it personal
October 25, 2022

Keeping it personal

When you’re a one-man band it has to be personal.  Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t keep it that way if you plan to seriously scale.  It’s almost a definition of ‘corporate’ that ‘I’ becomes ‘they’.

I believe that this loss of the personal is part of what puts many micro-business owners off growth, not the ‘lack of ambition’ ascribed to them, by government reports.

Conventional wisdom is not wrong – as the business founders insert layers of hierarchy and function between themselves and their customers, the relationship between business and customer can often feel impersonal, transactional.   A brand, no matter how great, isn’t a person.

What’s wrong is the assumption that introducing functions and hierarchies is the only way to scale.

What if, at that point where 10-ish people work with you, you decided to make them all ‘the boss’- each one of them capable and authorised to deliver on your promises the way you do?

What if, instead of splitting the customer experience into separate functions, you kept it intact from end to end and made each and every person in the business responsible for delivering it to their clients?

What if, instead of introducing layers of management to distract your team from your customers, you gave them a Customer Experience Score to follow and let them manage themselves?  With responsbility for the consequences of course.

You’d scale your business and keep it personal.  It’s just that the person your clients deal wouldn’t have to be you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Intrigued?  Ask me how.

Scaling
October 20, 2022

Scaling

If you’re a micro business looking to serve more people well, consider this before you add the next person to your team:

Are you trying to make your music louder or more complex?

Getting louder is simple.  Just let each new person follow the score you play from, alongside you.   On a different instrument maybe, to give richness to the sound.  Or give them a copy of your score so they can play elsewhere or in a different timezone.   It’ll still be your music, still a personal experience for customers, only nearer to them.

Once you’ve mastered louder, making your music more complex gets easier too.  Write a new score for the new thing you want to offer, teach new or existing people to play it, and put them wherever you want, to harmonise or contrast with your existing musicians.  Better still, make sure every player is able to play every variation, in case they need to.   So you can make your complex music louder.

It’s hard to do both at once without confusing your musicians and your audience.

So if in doubt, I’d start with louder.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

A watched pot
October 4, 2022

A watched pot

Decades ago, my older brothers were given the job of breaking up concrete in the back garden so my dad could lay a new patio.

They did a morning’s work, had lunch and started again in the afternoon.   After an hour or so, my mum thought “They’ve been at it a while, I better see if they need a cup of tea.”

Then walked into the breakfast room to find nothing but a cassette player running.

They’d carefully recorded themselves in the morning so they could bunk off in the afternoon.

 

Corporate Rebels shared a Bloomberg article today:

“More than two years after remote work and hybrid jobs became widespread, there’s still a stark divide over how it’s going: About 85% of managers worry they can’t tell if employees are getting enough done, while 87% of workers say their productivity is just fine.”

With this admonition from Microsoft: “Don’t Spy on Employees to Ensure They’re Working,“

This is the 21st century for goodness sake.

Have we not learned to measure results rather than “activity”?

I can’t help thinking it’s management that needs an overhaul.

 

 

Hint: If you’re a micro-business employer I can help you with that.

Anarchy
September 27, 2022

Anarchy

Not many people know this.

I’m an anarchist.

I believe in autonomy and self-determination.   I don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else what to do – except in rare cases where doing so might save a person’s life.

I also believe in collaboration and co-operation – the getting together of autonomous individuals to achieve something much bigger than themselves.

To co-operate successfully, participants need to know what they have to do.   They need to know when it has to be done.   But that knowledge doesn’t have to come from someone telling them as they go.   It can come from a shared ‘document’ everyone can access, whenever they need to.

That’s why I like the idea of a business as an orchestra.

Often, when people think of an orchestra, they focus on the conductor.   But the conductor isn’t there to tell players what to do, they’re there to help them keep time, and to provide hints to aid this particular interpretation.   It’s up to each player to choose how to get the right sound out of their instrument at the right time.  What has to happen, when, is recorded by the composer in a score.

The conductor is a role, like a cellist or percussionist, not a position in a hierarchy.   In fact it’s perfectly possible to run a succesful orchestra without a conductor – you simply get people to take turns.

What really pulls an orchestra together is the score – a map of the sound experience to be created for an audience.

The person behind the score is the composer.  They’re the one whose legacy lasts longest, and scales furthest.

So if you’re an employer, and like me, you have a problem with being told what to do, consider rethinking your role.

How could you make yourself a conductor rather than a boss?

Or even better, how could you make yourself a composer?

 

Hint: talk to me about becoming a Disappearing Boss.

What makes me angry
September 23, 2022

What makes me angry

On the whole, I’m a pretty laid-back person.

But you know what really makes me angry?

Seeing amazing micro businesses die when their owner disappears.  Whether that’s because they’ve sold up, gone off to do something else, or simply wound down and died.

All that innovation, all that care, all that value, wiped out.  Wasted.

Unnecessarily.

It makes me really angry.  And I’m on a mission to do something about it.

Because all it takes to avoid that waste is a decision to ‘disappear’ from your business earlier, on purpose, replacing yourself with a flexible, supportive framework that enables others to be ‘a boss’ instead of you.

The irony is that by doing this in plenty of time, you’ll start to enjoy running your business again.   You might even want to grow it.  But you won’t have to be there.

Help me on my mission.

If you know an amazing micro-business that deserves to last longer than it’s owner, tell me about them, put them in touch.

We need these amazing businesses to be around for longer.

They’re what makes our commercial life worth living.

Magical thinking
September 22, 2022

Magical thinking

This book, ‘Alchemy’ was recommended to me by the talented Andrea Horgan, (along with ‘Evolutionary Ideas‘) so of course I had to interrupt my current reading for it.

 

It’s a useful and entertaining read, and so far I’d sum up the findings thus:

  • Businesses that put their clients first do well.
  • Businesses that think about their clients as human beings rather than economical or mathematical abstractions, and then put them first, do exceptionally well.

 

I’d add:

  • Businesses that build that thinking into everything they do, do exceptionally well for a very long time.  Even after the founder is long gone.

 

It’s not magic, it’s simply focusing on the human.  But not many people do that.

Hard work
September 21, 2022

Hard work

It takes a lot of work to maintain a garden like this.

And the only way to renew or change it is to uproot everything and start again.

Much better to build a garden that can evolve with little tending.  Even at the cost of some untidiness.

That’s where the delightful surprises come from.

The revenge of Muri – a reprise
August 24, 2022

The revenge of Muri – a reprise

When times look good, or you think nobody will notice, it’s tempting to overload systems, processes and people.
A little cut here, a small increase in workload there.    A freeze on recruitment, a delay of re-equipping or upgrading.    It has no visible effect on the bottom line.    You get away with it.
So it becomes tempting to do it again.    To ‘keep it lean’, ‘cut no slack’, ask people to ‘lean in’, commit 100% 110%, 120%, 150%.
And again.
And again.
Then, when you’ve cut everything to the bone and built your entire system on just in time, lowest cost, no slack, it doesn’t take much to bring the whole thing crashing down.
It’s not rocket science.   We are part of a system.   Overloading any part of it is not sensible behaviour.  Overloading all of it at once is madness.

Freeloaders will try, of course, because it means they can extract a higher immediate return.   Blind to the fact that they will not be able to enjoy it.
It’s up to the rest of us to prevent them.   For their sakes as well as ours.

Legacies
August 23, 2022

Legacies

We all think we’re going to live forever.

We go through life making our dent in the universe without giving a thought to what might happen to it after we’ve gone.  If we think of a legacy at all, we think of it as money or assets to be left to our children.

There are other ways.

Artists leave a body of work that can remind everyone that comes after of their unique dent.   Writers or composers do even better.  They leave behind the means to re-create their work, so their unique dent can actually get wider and deeper for hundreds of years after they’ve turned to dust.

And many of us start enterprises.  Most of which will die when we do, even when they are successful.

Why?  When with a little effort, we could leave the means to continually renew and expand our dent to reach everyone who needs it for generations to come?

That’s what I’d call a legacy.

And my mission is to help business owners like you leave yours – for generations to come.