Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Dismantling the E-myth
April 2, 2019

Dismantling the E-myth

In his E-myth books, Michael Gerber identifies three key roles in a business: the entrepreneur, who drives the vision for the business; the technician, who does the work, and the manager who acts as a bridge between them, planning and organising the work of technicians to achieve the entrepreneur’s vision.

If the vision is shared by everyone, do you then need managers?

I don’t think so, but you do still need management – a way for the technicians to know what they have to do, and how well they are achieving the vision, so they can work out for themselves how best to move forwards.

This is great news for small business owners, because I’ve only ever met one person who wanted to be a manager.

If the vision is explicit and shared, and technicians manage themselves, do you then need an entrepreneur?

No, but you do need entrepreneurship – a way for technicians to see new ways to deliver the vision profitably.

So, if you can push both management and entrepreneurship down to the people who actually do the work, what happens to the entrepreneurs who founded it?

Their baby will have grown up, to be independent, autonomous with their original vision still in its DNA.

They get to choose what they do next.

Leverage
March 28, 2019

Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth”.

We tend to focus on the lever, but the ‘place to stand’ is just as important.

Without sure footing, the lever can’t get purchase.

When you know the essentials are being done consistently, you can experiment at the edges to make things better.

Discipline makes daring possible.

Control Freaks
March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

Replicating
March 6, 2019

Replicating

As Ray Kroc understood, recreating the look is not enough to make your new outlet convincing, no matter how faithfully you do it.

What matters is what happens inside.

Replicate that and you’ve got an asset you can scale.

It’s difficult, especially where ‘clockwork’ isn’t the feel you’re after, but it is possible.

The trick is to think up a level or two from the obvious.

Self-Orchestration
February 27, 2019

Self-Orchestration

Orpheus is an orchestra without a conductor.

That doesn’t mean they are directionless, they have a score that tells them what to play.

That doesn’t mean they are mechanical, a core group guides the interpretation for every piece they play, and that core group changes every time.

That doesn’t mean they are homogenous, many players dip in and out, although a minimum number of experienced players ensure the Orpheus promise is kept for every performance.

Being conductorless doesn’t mean they are leaderless, it means everyone has to step up and take their turn at leading.

There’s always another way of succeeding. It just needs to be thought through.

Orpheus (the orchestra) has been doing this for more than 40 years.

Adjustments
February 26, 2019

Adjustments

In a complex evolving system, the impulse to change often comes from outside. Something is felt at the edges and creates a kind of tension that can only be relieved by making some sort of adjustment.

It pays to make your edges sensitive to these tensions and to make the process of adjustment as quick and as easy as possible.

In a murmuration of starlings this happens through a small number of simple rules that each bird follows.

It ought to be possible to come up with something similar for a business.

It would probably look different for every business, but I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t involve waiting for instructions from the top.

Standardisation
February 21, 2019

Standardisation

‘Standardisation’ often results in every customer being treated the same – whether they like it or not.

To my mind, a better way of looking at standardisation is that it is about treating the same kind of customer in the same kind of way – and of course, in a way that delivers on the promise you’ve made to them before they bought..

So if, for example, you have 4 different services, you could design 4 delivery processes. They may have a lot of activities in common, but by designing a process for each service, you’re making sure the process is easier for everyone to follow – neither you nor your customer is being made to do unnecessary work.

It may even be the case that different people on your team prefer delivering one kind of service to another, so splitting them means you can always have the best person for the job.

Of course there will always be exceptions, so room has to be left for these to be handled in a way that still delivers on the promise, but they should really be exceptions.

The key to all of this, is to start from the customer’s shoes.

The interesting thing is that, in my experience, getting it right from the customer’s perspective, actually makes things much easier and more profitable to run.

Not Applicable
February 20, 2019

Not Applicable

If you have a checklist with items that can be ‘not applicable’, you haven’t got a checklist, you’ve got at least 2 checklists, and you’re asking for trouble.

Including every possible option doesn’t make executing the process easier.

Leeway – but not complete freedom
February 17, 2019

Leeway – but not complete freedom

Quilts have often been made collaboratively, especially in America, where the idea of making a quilt in components (called blocks) really took off. This method meant a quilt top could be assembled very quickly, since the production of blocks was effectively parallelised. If you wanted a bigger quilt, you simply enlisted more friends.

Once the component blocks were completed, they were sewn together to make the top, which was then tacked together with the filling and backing layers. Then everyone got together again to quilt the 3 layers into a single unified whole – the finished quilt.

As well as speeding up the making, this block method allows considerable leeway to the individual contributors. In this Friendship quilt, each contributor has chosen their own block design, but they’ve clearly been given a colour scheme to work with, and at least some fabrics have been shared – its leeway, but not complete freedom.

The result is a bedcover that looks coherent, but is still lively and full of interest. An excellent example of balancing tight rules with interpretive latitude.

Those quiltmakers knew a lot about creative collaboration.