Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Why do I need process if I have good people? Memory
June 17, 2019

Why do I need process if I have good people? Memory

Why do I need process if I have good people?

Without a process, some of the knowledge of “what we do here” and as importantly, “how we do things round here” and “why we do what we do” gets lost every time one of your ‘good people’ leaves.   This knowledge also gets changed as new people join.

This can be overcome by a founder that spends time and energy ‘policing’ the culture (think Steve Jobs), but one day even the founder will disappear.

Process gives your business a memory of its own.

That memory needn’t be prescriptive.  The most detailed score still leaves room for interpretation, and you can make it more improv if that’s your style.

If the business always remembers the “what”, “how” and “why”, your people don’t need to make it up as they go along.

The best protection is permeable
May 24, 2019

The best protection is permeable

As every Chelsea gardener knows, the best way to protect your garden from wind is not a solid wall or fence, but a permeable barrier like a hedge.

This filters the wind, slowing it down, letting in fresh air to circulate among your precious plants and shrubs without damaging them.

A solid barrier on the other hand lets air crash over it like a wave – and then falls at the first gale.

What do small business owners want?
May 8, 2019

What do small business owners want?

You’ve guessed it.

  • Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.

The question I, and business advisers like me, need to be asking ourselves is then:

What can I do to help them achieve these things?

The side-effect of delivering that is likely to be scalability.

Potting
May 3, 2019

Potting

It’s very satisfying to try out your idea for a pot, refining with each attempt until you come up with a version you are happy with. But what about reproducing that time after time exactly, in the quantities required to make profit?

To make a living, potters have to choose between two poles – to be an ‘artist’ commanding high prices for one-off pieces, or become a ‘manufacturer’, getting other people to churn out copies of their original by the thousand, competing with even bigger manufacturers to reach a mass market.

Studio potteries are the mid-point many have found.

Small runs of standard wares in standard glazes are produced by the potter and their team, with enough variation in the form and glazes to satisfy maker and purchaser. One-off pieces can behave more like art and give scope for exploration of ideas that keep the pottery style current.

That seems like a sweet spot in which to sit, and it doesn’t have to be small.

Network effects
May 2, 2019

Network effects

I first became interested in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at school. I read everything I could about them, gradually expanding my reading to encompass their associates, friends and family, then widened further to include adjacent or overlapping art styles such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Years later, I’m still surprised by finding new connections between artist craftspeople of this era and people who designed and things I actually own.

The most interesting thing about this is how organic it is – a furniture maker’s nephew becomes a glass designer, a family friend gets roped in to help with embroidery and ends up founding a needlework school.

It took longer than we would like today, but gradually, these people changed the world around them, and continue to do so.

Something worth remembering in the rush for exit.

Work/Life Balance
May 1, 2019

Work/Life Balance

Too often, it seems, people have to look outside their work to achieve the things that matter to them – agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and community.

What if the thing we call ‘work’ enabled this too?

Owners who offer this to the people who work with them, find themselves able to achieve more of these things outside the workplace.

There’s no need to balance anything. It’s all life.

Measuring what matters
April 23, 2019

Measuring what matters

Years ago, on my way to work, I’d call in to the Benjy’s sandwich bar next to Cannon Street Station to pick up breakfast. It was always full of other City workers doing the same thing.

In those days, the hot sandwiches and toast were freshly made, and there were only 2 kinds of coffee – with or without milk. You ordered at the counter, waited for your food, and paid at the till.

So far, the same as every other Benjy’s.

But here’s where it changed, because the manager of this Benjy’s had a system.

He took your hot food order, shouted it to the team in the kitchen behind him, wrote it on a paper bag and stacked that bag on top of the one before. That was it. You mooched around the shop (picking up an extra snack or two), until he called out your order. You picked it up along with a tea or coffee from the ready-made batch at the counter, then paid at lightning speed at the till.

The wait for food was never that long – he had clearly parallelised that, so that bacon, eggs and baguettes were always ready, and the stock of teas and coffees was constantly topped up, at least during the busiest times of breakfast and lunch.

All in all it probably took less time to happen than it’s taken me to write down.

What this manager had realised was that what mattered to his clients was not the wait for hot food, it was the wait to place an order. So he built his system around minimising that.

Once you saw that paper bag go down, you knew you were taken care of and could relax. Once you knew your order was in, you weren’t going to walk out without it. In fact you were likely to spend more, to fill in time while you waited.

I never visited another Benjy’s that worked like this one.

I’m guessing that central management assumed that the volume of business this manager handled was simply down to being next to a busy commuter railway station, so never thought to come and look at how he did it, so they could pass that system on to other franchisees.

I don’t know what they were measuring, but it wasn’t what mattered. Which may be why the chain failed.

Wasted effort
April 17, 2019

Wasted effort

It’s easy to get very excited about increasing efficiency through digitalisation, automation and AI.

But in the excitement we can forget that by ‘increasing efficiency’ what we are really trying to do is reduce ‘waste’, or to put it better, ‘wasted effort’.

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ falls under 3 categories:

  1. ‘Mura’ or wasted effort due to variation
  2. ‘Muri’ or wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.
  3. ‘Muda’ also known as the “seven forms of wasted effort”

Muri seems like the kind of wasted effort we should always try to eliminate (and interestingly, is the least talked about).

Otherwise, what makes effort wasted?

Quite simply that the customer is not willing to pay for it.

This seems blindingly obvious. Less obvious is the necessary implication – that if a customer is willing to pay for effort, it is not wasted.

So if a certain type of customer is happy to pay extra to be treated differently, this is not Mura. If a customer is willing to pay to have their papers picked up in person, this is not Muda.

The customer’s perception of value is your source of profit. Don’t throw it out with the bathwater.

Passive Income
April 15, 2019

Passive Income

Everyone, it seems, is looking for ‘passive income’ – money you don’t have to work hard for, that simply flows from the ownership of an asset.

The most popular asset of this kind is property – land or the buildings on it.   The problem with this is that the underlying resource is finite, and the more people want these assets, the higher the price.

Next comes intellectual property – patents, design rights, licenses.  These take deep pockets to defend, and ultimately expire.

Then there is debt.  This too is limited as a passive income stream because ultimately it kills the source.

There is a type of asset that has none of these limitations.   The autonomous enterprise.   A business that runs without you, generating income by continuously creating new value for the people it serves, and continually finding new ways to create that value.

Paradoxically, this kind of asset is only possible when you fully devolve management and reward to the people who work in it.   That’s not easy to do, it takes courage and a long-view.   But those are the only factors that make it scarce.

Given a framework it can thrive in, there is no limit to human ingenuity.

P.S. I discovered writing this that the word ‘asset’ actually comes from the French for ‘enough’.   That’s an interesting fact worth remembering.