November 8, 2023
A small shift
There’s a famous pair of formulae in Marx’s Capital that describe the difference between trade and capitalism. The first is … Read More “A small shift”
Category: Scaleability
November 2, 2023
Word of mouth
We all know that recommendation by an existing customer is the most powerful and the most sincere form of marketing. … Read More “Word of mouth”
October 25, 2023
Where does leadership sit?
Here’s an interesting debate on leadership and where it fits, kicked off by Michele Zanini. Not just in the article he refers to, but the comments also.
Everyone can be a leader. Most people are already leaders, somewhere in their lives. Just not at work.
But with all the crises we face, don’t we need as big a team as possible of “everyone in the organization who can make amazing things happen”?
Where does leadership sit in your business?
Where could it sit, if you enabled it?
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 23, 2023
Standard Operating Procedures
I don’t know about you, but that phrase “Standard Operating Procedures” makes me cringe. I completely get why they are needed in certain contexts – manufacturing, engineering, military, – anything where you’re dealing with things, or beings that you treat as things.
But as soon as human beings become part of the equation, there can be no such thing as standard – from either side of the operation.
If you’re a business that focuses on delivering a service to humans, by humans, consistency is what you want, not the uniformity of standardisation. However your service is being delivered, and whoever is delivering it, it should feel consistent with your Promise of Value. Since humans are involved, that inevitably means variation – of the kind that standardisation stifles. The kind that allows your people to over-deliver on your Promise and delight individual clients – even when things go wrong.
So, as you design and document the services that enable your business to deliver though others, remember to empower that ability to vary in your team.
Not only will it make for more delight and flexibility, it will be the means by which you discover new needs and desires in your client base.
In manufacturing and engineering, variation is deviation. But for humans and other living beings, and the businesses that serve them, it truly is the spice of life.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 20, 2023
From dictatorship to democracy in a single generation
In business, our view of succession is not unlike that of royals. An heir apparent is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.
This approach is fraught with difficulties.
First, as regnant monarch, we put off the selection, training and all that, because we’d rather not face our own mortality, and because to do all that takes time out from running the business.
Next, the heir we select may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. They may have other ideas on what to do with their life.
The people we’ve overlooked may resent that, and start to at least detach themselves from the business, or undermine it, or worse decide to fight over it.
Finally, there may not be an obvious heir.
There is a more rational, modern approach.
- Build your business around a clearly defined customer experience (an OurScore ), that gives people the confidence to know what they are doing without constraining their personality and individuality.
- Give people clear roles to play. Put all the resources they need to play them well at their fingertips. Including the feedback that will enable them to improve both the customer experience and their own ability to deliver it.
- Train them to perform more than one role, so they can have variety of work, you have redundancy in the system and the customer learns that they can happily deal with anyone in the business.
Built this way, a business more or less runs itself.
It gives you far more options for succession, because anyone who works in it can be your heir, if they want.
Or everyone.
A transition from dictatorship to democracy in a single generation.
That would be a legacy to be really proud of.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 17, 2023
Managing without managers
I found this excellent article by Michele Zanini yesterday: ‘Can we manage without managers?’.
It’s well worth a read, but here are the phrases that jumped out for me:
“vanguard organisations … don’t get rid of management as a set of activities (e.g., planning, allocating, reviewing)–but they syndicate it to the broader organization. “
“By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed to advancement, an organization ends up with more, not fewer leaders.“
Because actually, we want leadership without managers.
One of the objections often raised to a no-manager organisation is “If you remove layers, you’ll end up ovewhelming people at the top“. Overwhelm at the top is a common experience for growing micros.
What this article shows is that there are other, far better ways of dealing with that than adding managers. Writing down the music in your head, so that others can play it is one of them.
Why not start as you mean to grow on and make everyone a leader?
October 16, 2023
Taking ownership
One day, the child in this photograph might expect to inherit her parents’ motorbike.
She couldn’t expect to use it until she’d learned to drive it safely, keep it in good order and register it with the appropriate authorities. If that seems like too much trouble, she might very well sell it, run it into the ground, or simply leave it to rust.
Handing over your business to your employees (or your children for that matter) isn’t enough to ensure that it will thrive afterwards. Transferring ownership transfers power, but not the ability to use that power responsibly.
Of course your people might have that ability already, but if you’re the boss of a 5 or 10 person business, it’s unlikely that you or they know that conclusively.
After the sale is almost too late to find that out. You’re not the boss any more.
So, if you’re planning to go employee-owned, or to pass your business on to your children, make sure they know how to run it before they take ownership.
- Spell out your Promise of Value, so everyone know exactly who the business serves and what it really does for them.
- Document your desired customer experience with an OurScore , so everyone can see the context of the business as a whole.
- Let people learn and play multiple parts of that score, so they feel how it all fits together.
- Give them responsibility for living up to the Promise in all the parts they play, and the autonomy to interpret it, to enhance the audience experience.
- Automate admin and the collection of feedback from each performance.
- Get everyone used to regular practice at using that feedback to improve both the OurScore and their own playing skills.
This takes effort, but not as much as you might think. Like most things, the sooner you start, the better. But you could do it while the legalities of transfer are being worked out, or even include it as part of the transfer process.
The upside is you’ll have something even more worth handing over, and for all the new bosses, the ability to truly cherish it as your legacy.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 11, 2023
Why Muri matters
Absorb. Adapt. Transform.
If you’ve ever experienced some kind of shock to your business – like your server being hit by lightning, or a pandemic lockdown – you’ll recognise these three phases of response, even if you went through them unconsciously.
1: Absorb: It’s all hands on deck – you double down, work harder, get people to do overtime, call in retired people, pull in help from fellow businesses or family. Whatever it takes to withstand the first effects of the shock.
2: Adapt: Things are different now. The old ways of doing, the old roles, locations and certainties don’t apply any more. Work-arounds are what’s needed, and you and your team find them.
3: Transform: Now the worst is over, you all take a breath, and think how best to change how your business works, so when a similar shock happens in the future, you’ll be ready for it. Some of your work-arounds will become part of the system, others won’t. It’s worth remembering that not all shocks are inherently undesirable – a rush of new customers from referrals is just as much of a shock to the system as a lightning strike. So it pays to think up some other possible shock scenarios and re-design and re-equip your system to cope with those too. Or at least plan how you will be able to absorb it enough to give you time to adapt and transform.
Which brings me back to the point.
Muri matters, because if people, machines and systems are already operating at 100% or over when a shock hits, it’s extremely hard to respond effectively. And only people can make systems work at over 100%. With no room to absorb, how can you possibly move on to adapt or learn to thrive in the new world by transforming? Muri destroys resilience.
My way to prepare for this is to share everything about how your business works with everyone in it.
- Document your customer experience with an OurScore , so everyone can see the context.
- Have individuals play multiple roles and deliver multiple aspects of your business promise.
- Give them the autonomy to develop solutions to exceptions as they occur.
- Make sure everyone shares their findings.
In other words, introduce the ultimate level of redundancy – make everyone a Boss.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Ask me how.
September 27, 2023
What will it do?
What will it do?
When we start our businesses, we don’t really know.
We know what we want to do. More of the things we enjoy, less of the things we don’t, with no interference from the boss.
We have an inkling that left to ourselves, we can probably produce something much more in line with what the customer wants than we were able to as a small cog in a big machine.
Or we hope that having experienced a problem and found a new solution, there might be others who will welcome what we’ve discovered.
In truth, we don’t really know who they are, what they want, or how they want it.
That’s fine.
The job of a startup is to find that out. We need to be observant, flexible, opportunistic, open to a different who, a different what. A certain amount of thrashing is inevitable.
But once we do know who and what, thrashing no longer serves. Now we need to concentrate on how. Hand-crafting a consistent customer experience, ‘doing things that don’t scale’ until we’ve really hit the mark.
Until finally, we’ve answered the question “What will it do?”
You’re no longer a startup.
And the next challenge begins.
Because if you really have hit the mark for a significant number of people, the next question is “How can I do it like this for more people?”, “How do I replicate my actions through other people or through software so that I can reach more of the people who want what I can offer, in the way that I offer it?”
You don’t have to scale of course. You can stick with a handcrafted service and a select clientele. Just make sure they are paying you full value for that.
But if you want to reach more people, have an even bigger impact, you need to think about scaling up the system you’ve inadvertently designed.
Scaling up starts with treating it as a design, rather than a happy accident- soon to be overtaken by the next.
Which means starting by writing your design down. So there’s a reference point, a specification, an intention.
So that from now on, everyone knows what it has to do.
Otherwise how can you work how best to share the work? Or how best to automate it? Or whether the solutions you’ve chosen actually do the job? How do you know where to be flexible and where to stay firm? Or where you can leave it to the people on the ground to decide?
It doesn’t mean the design can’t change, it just means that every change is in service to what everyone knows it has to do.
And as we’re discovering with HS2, waiting until its half-built to decide exactly what it’s meant to do, is an expensive way to fail.
Discipline before you start building makes real Daring possible later.
September 26, 2023
Self care
I think quite a lot about ‘Muri’ – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems.
It’s the Cinderella of waste, mostly ignored by management consultants and gurus. Perhaps because it exposes the dark heart of capitalism. The more you sweat your ‘assets’, the more money you make. Who cares if you break them along the way, as long as your pile ends up big enough for you to move on and do it again?
Things are different inside small employer businesses – at least the ones I know.
There, the ‘assets’ most likely to be subjected to Muri are owners. They are the ones who take up all the slack. Who ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give 110%’, ‘do whatever it takes’ to keep the promises they’ve made.
Not because they’re aiming for burnout, but because they haven’t yet realised that if they share the work effectively with their team, nobody needs to overwork themselves.
‘Sharing the work effectively with your team’ is easier said than done, and easier done than you imagine, when you visualise your business operations as a musical score, and your team as an orchestra performing it over an over agin, getting better all the time.
Putting this in place could be the ultimate exercise in self care – for you, your business and your team.
And everyone will thrive as a result.
Discipline makes Daring possible.