If you’re worried about the economy, and what might happen to your business this year, I’m going to recommend this book again:
The Joy of Tax, by Richard Murphy. My copy, photographed by me.
and this free pdf by the same author:
Downloadable from here.
You can’t take the best actions, if you don’t know how the system really works. Take a moment to feel the water you’re swimming in.
Discipline makes Daring possible
As a musical instrument, the triangle is often regarded as a bit of a joke. A bit ridiculous. Not to be taken seriously.
Yet a composer includes it in their orchestration for a reason – because it’s unique sound contributes to the experience they wish to convey. Without it the composer’s promise couldn’t be kept.
When times are hard, it’s tempting to strip back on our offer. To cut down on the details of our customer experience.
Just remember, it’s your promise you’re really stripping back. Eventually it will show.
Use your natural ingenuity to find a better way to keep it instead.
Even if you’re sure you’ll disagree, it’s worth reading Marx’s ‘Capital‘. Especially if you’re a small business owner.
As an explanation of how ‘the system’ works, its far more enlightening than anything I was taught at London Business School.
I’m also pretty sure that most of the people who attend the World Economic Forum at Davos have read it, and use that knowledge to their advantage.
Knowing Marx won’t hurt you, The least that will happen is that you have another lens to see things through.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
PS Even better read in conjunction with Professor David Harvey’s ‘Companion to Marx’s Capital‘, or with his open lecture series at The People’s Forum in New York City.
From our perspective as a user, the search engine, the AI generator, the social network, the online shop are simply tools. Tools we use to do the things we need to do for work or pleasure.
From the perspective of the tool owners – Alphabet, OpenAi, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon – they are not just tools, they are a factor of production. As we are. We are the factor that creates value.
Why then do we give our labour for free?
Because the factory is hidden from us, of course. That way we can’t withdraw our labour.
“Prompt: “short, scrawny figure; hunched shoulders; weak, sagging jawline; thin, greasy hair; unkempt, unruly style; dull, lifeless eyes; lack of intelligence, confidence; wrinkled, sallow skin; excessive stubble; crooked, hooked nose; thin, pursed lips; flabby, untoned body; undefined, flabby muscles; exudes weakness, insecurity, unattractiveness; epitome of masculine ugliness; timid, self-doubting; air of nervousness, insecurity; truly a sight to avoid; unimpressive” via Midjourney v4, prompt generated by chatGPT after requesting description of the opposite of a perfect man“. Cameron Butler
“If the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to it by a machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as little time as possible may be spent on it. It is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.” William Morris
Lifestyle businesses get a bad rap. As if they are not serious. As if they are not real businesses.
In a ‘lifestyle’ business, people make things, or offer their services, for money, that they then use to buy other things which support and enhance their lifestyle – including keeping the business going.
In a ‘proper’ (i.e. capitalist) business, people put money into ventures that will make them more money, that they then use to put into either the same venture or others, that will make them more money. Sometimes the venture is making things that enhance lifestyles, but it doesn’t really matter what it is (smoking, sugary food, addictive medicines) as long as it turns money into more money. Capitalist business is how we’ve got to the mess we’re in.
But it’s lifestyle businesses that get a bad rap.
When in fact they are the original (and best) business type.
They don’t even have to be small. A lifestyle business can support hundreds of people, maybe even thousands.
The point is that they are about life, not money.
Let’s have more lifestyle businesses, I say.
And let’s make them even easier to run for their owners, so they can get bigger and last longer without turning capitalist.
It may not feel like it, but regulation is simply another form of feedback for your business. It just happens to be the kind of feedback you are not allowed to ignore.
Think of it as feedback from your industry. Lessons learned by others that can save you grief. Of course not all of it is designed to help your business, sometimes it’s the result of bigger players flexing their muscle in the market, to make it harder for businesses like yours. Even that is useful feedback – telling you where the bigger players feel vulnerable. Use it to your advantage.
Since you can’t ignore regulatory feedback, it pays to have a really clear Promise, and plenty of the other kinds of feedback coming in regularly, so that you can make sure the requirements of regulation can’t unduly distort your unique way of making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.
That means that as far as possible, compliance, like admin, needs to be a side effect of doing what you’re here to do, not the other way around.
Of course you need to be compliant, but the regulator shouldn’t come first.
They’re not your customer.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.
Somewhere back in the 15th century, probably unintentionally, we remade our world, creating a system we now call capitalism.
This system is so good at reproducing itself it now includes everyone and everything on Earth – and even beyond. Whether they like it or not.
We’ve trapped ourselves inside a system that is good for some, very bad for others and terrible for our planet.
It wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. We can change the system.
But how? Especially when the people at the top are those that benefit most?
Our small businesses are worlds we make and can easily remake.
Why not start there? Build a tiny version of the kind of world you’d like to see: democratic, participatory, responsibly autonomous, humane, non-extractive. Liberating.
Bottom up, inside out.
Until one day, we are the new system.
Jean Hunnisett was a costume designer. Someone whose job it is not just to recreate ‘the look’ of a particular period, but to recreate it in a way that is comfortable and practical for the actor to perform in.
People have changed over the centuries, becoming fuller and taller. Clothes have become lighter and less constricting. Women are no longer used to re-configuring their bodies to suit the current trend by wearing corsets from childhood. So a costume designer’s job is never to simply reproduce historical examples, it is to re-interpret, re-measure and re-size those historical examples to produce the desired effect on screen without crippling the actor.
That’s hard work. And Jean Hunnisett did it. Once it was done, she put it out there for the world to share in her costumes and her books. For people like me and Vivienne Westwood to find.
No matter how unique our genius, how brilliant our vision, we achieve nothing alone. We build on the free gifts of human nature left by those who came before and those who work around us now.
That by no means diminishes our achievements.
But it seems only fair to acknowledge the gifts that enable us.
What do you really want?
I’m willing to bet that it’s something like this:
You can build a successful business by delivering this for your clients through what you give them and the way you do it.
You can build a sustainable business by delivering this for your people through the way that you enable them to deliver to clients on your behalf.
Do both, and you’ve sorted yourself out too.