Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking

Where this blog title came from
August 8, 2023

Where this blog title came from

Christmas, 2014.  I was listening to The Reith Lectures on Radio 4.

As usual, I hadn’t taken much notice of who was behind what I was listening to (I didn’t find out who played my favourite ever dance record until 30 years later).  Then the speaker said something that galvanised me.

“Discipline makes Daring possible”.

After that I had to follow up on it.

The lecture was the second of a series on “The Future of Medicine”.  The speaker was Dr Atul Gawande and the episode title was “The Century of the System”.

It “tells the story of how a little-known hospital in Austria managed to develop a complex yet highly effective system for dealing with victims of drowning.” – specifically in freezing water.  A system that could be triggered by the receptionist.

The story came from Gawande’s book, “The Checklist Manifesto“.   I tracked down a copy, bought it and devoured it in one sitting.

I thoroughly recommend it.   Not just because it shows how something as simple as a checklist can save millions of lives, also because it shows how resistant ‘professionals’ are to any kind of systemisation.

Which fed nicely into my fascination with finding that fine balance between systems and humans that makes for consistently rich and evolving customer experiences, as well as consistently rich and evolving employee experiences.

If discipline is what makes daring possible, how little of it can you get away with?

How much daring can it enable?

I don’t know.

But I’m still enjoying finding out.

Express yourself
August 7, 2023

Express yourself

Starting a business is largely about you.  Expressing your passions, your purpose, your vision.

But it can’t be only about you.

The secret is to express yourself in a way that resonates with other people.   That allows them to express something about themselves too.

Some will want to be customers, others will want to help you do more of it, still others will want to bask in the glow of your success.

Your business starts with you.  But it mustn’t end there.

Building it as a system for making and keeping promises is an excellent way to remind yourself of this.

 

Discipline makes daring Possible

Commodities
August 3, 2023

Commodities

A commodity is a product that is easily interchangeable with other products that perform the same function.

Soap.

Teaspoons.

Washing machines.

TVs.

Employees.

Customers.

Accountants.

Lawyers.

Management consultants.

 

Wherever there are many almost indistinguishible options, those things become a commodity.

To a potential buyer, the only thing that matters about them is their price.  Not how they are produced, or where, or who by.

 

You don’t have to join in.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

What if it doesn’t work?
August 1, 2023

What if it doesn’t work?

It’s hard to Disappear from the business you started – although not as hard as you might think.  After all, for a long time, you aren’t ‘gone’, you’ve just blended yourself in.  The disappearance is gradual, so everyone has time to get used to it.  Including you.

It’s probably better to say it’s hard to get started on Disappearing.

Why?

Because it’s  step into the unknown. And what if it doesn’t work?  What if this is the wrong choice?  What if there is something better out there?

To which in all honesty, my answers have to be:  ‘It might not work for you. It might be the wrong choice for you.  There might well be something better out there for you.’

But if you know you want to change your relationship with your business, there’s only one way to find out what the right solution for you is.

And that’s to take a step into the unknown.

My job is to make taking that step as easy and as comfortable as possible.  To show you as quickly as possible that what we do together will give you what you need.   To make sure that even if you decide to stop, you still feel you’ve gained something worthwhile.

I can tell you till I’m blue in the face that it has worked for most of the people who tried it.  In some cases spectacularly. Nobody lost by it.

But me telling you, or even me showing you, isn’t going to be as convincing as you having a go for yourself.

For that reason I’m going to start a club.

It’s called The Disappearing Bosses’ Club.

It will start in September with a 3-month experiment to find out what you really need, and put that in place.

I’m looking for pioneers to help me do that.

Let me know if you’re interested.

Thank you as always for being there.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Succession
July 31, 2023

Succession

“My demonic drive to overcome or destroy any barrier certainly helped Riverford up to a point. But since we became employee owned, I’ve come to appreciate that dispersed power & consultation lead to better, safer, less impulsive decisions, & they don’t have to come at the price of bravery & responsiveness. Watching governance develop at Riverford makes me realise we need to give those with emotional balance, who shout less & don’t need power to bolster their fragile egos, a route to leadership & influence.” Guy Singh-Watson.

As the entrepreneur, the original Boss, you are the pebble that got the ripples going, the source of the vision that made the business take off.  But as we know, that doesn’t necessarily make you the best person to take it further.

At least, not on your own.

But for a founder, it can be incredibly scary to cede control, to hand over responsibility for that precious customer experience to someone else.

The answer is to take the ‘governance’ – the way your vision drives what the business does, and how it does it – out of one head (or a few), and build it into the business itself.

So it can be a firm foundation for leadership and influence; a springboard for bravery and responsiveness, accessible to everyone.

A bit of Discipline from you, the original Boss, makes Daring possible.   Everyone can become a Boss.

There’s no better way to ensure that your legacy will ripple on.

Ask me how.

 

Humanity
July 28, 2023

Humanity

Today’s recommendation is to read ‘Humanocracy‘ by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini; to follow them on LinkedIn, and to subscribe to their YouTube channel, ‘The New Human Movement‘

 

Yes, they are talking about big organisations.

They are also in many cases old organisations, who have lasted this long often at the top of their industry.

They are also in many cases big, old organisations who have managed to survive by changing how they run themselves.

 

What they all have in common is that they view the business as a great big collaboration of talented people, rather than a machine.

 

How big could your business get if you looked at it this way?  How long could it last?

 

You have an enormous advantage over these organisations – you haven’t gone corporate yet, so you don’t have to undo that first.

 

Take it.

 

“This is what is possible when you treat human beings like they are actually human beings”. John Ferriola.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Serendipity
July 27, 2023

Serendipity

Today I’m recommending two platforms that exemplify serendipity – the finding of interesting things you weren’t actually looking for.

The first is Wikimedia Commons, a library of images, sounds and videos available to use for free, usually under a creative commons license.   I get almost all of the images I use for my blog from this platform, so I look here every day.

This morning, a picture of rather beautiful countryside in the Western Caucasus intrigued me, so I clicked on it.  Having read through the Wikipedia entry, I clicked on another link and ended up at the Circassian Genocide, an event I’d never heard of.   Sadly, just one of many.

Wikipedia is brilliant platform for a bit of mental flânerie, The information it contains is so interconnected, you never know where you might end up, or what you might learn.  Well worth allowing 10 minutes a day for.

The second such platform is Connect the Carbon Dots, a project that came out of The Carbon Almanac.

Connect the Carbon Dots is a platform that shows the interconnectedness of the climate emergency with other pressing issues for humanity, but more importantly the interconnectedness of solutions for those issues.

Because if you can see the system, you can change the system, especially if you get together with other to do it.

We’re currently looking at ways to make it even more useful. Have a look, explore, see where it takes you.

Richness
July 26, 2023

Richness

One of the ways those who benefit most from the status quo try to put us off doing anything effective about the climate crisis is by telling us that our lives will be poorer as a result.

The truth is our lives will be different.  In the same way that my life now is different from that of my parents, and even more different from their parents before them.

Here’s my counter argument:

Humans beings are extremely creative.  We can find enjoyment, art and pleasure in the most unpromising of surroundings and the most minimal accoutrements.  We will invent (are inventing) new ways of doing the things we enjoy.

We already have lots of things to play with.  Things we’ve already made, that can be passed around, recycled, and repurposed in so many ways. People are still listening to radios their grandparents and great-grandparents listened to. We will find (are finding) ways to keep them from polluting our environment any further.

We can grow and make lots more things.  They may not be the same things we grew before, and we will have to make them in different ways, that don’t damage our chances of survival on the planet, but we are extremely creative we will find (are finding) multiple ways.

We’re being offered a form of minimalism.  We don’t have to accept it.

Which is why my recommendation for today is to take a look at Kaffe Fassett to see just how wonderful more can be.

The ability to enrich our lives doesn’t depend on money.

It depends on how we look at things.

A bit of Discplined looking can make Daring possible.

Unusual perspectives
July 25, 2023

Unusual perspectives

Today, I’m recommending Jason Fried’s blog.

As I’m sure you know, Jason wrote “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work“, a book well worth reading if you haven’t already.

Jason writes from the perspective of a business that is ‘big enough’, doesn’t need to be bigger, and is primarily a vehicle for improving the lives of its customers and employees.

Nowadays that’s quite the radical view, and it gives him a very different perspective on all the things businesses do, or are told they should do which is really refreshing and always makes me think.

If you’d like an even more radical perspective on what business could be, I also recommend Ari’s Top 5 by Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses.

And if you’d like to create your own, more rounded perspective on business and it’s place in the world, I recommend the Wolf Tool from Bev Costoya.

Discipline makes Daring possible.