The Autonomous Enterprise – Page 13 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 2, 2020

Cheap Labour

Over the last 4 decades I’ve visited quite a few cotton mills that have been preserved as museums. The thing that always struck me was how old the machinery was. Often it had been in place for 90 -100 years. Had nobody invented better machines during that time?

Yes they had. But if you can find cheaper labour to mind your old machines, you can get away without upgrading them. And that had worked for a good while on our textile industry. But sooner or later a more efficient business (or one with access to even cheaper labour) will take you out.

In a service industry value is generated by people rather than machines. If you’re in it for the long term, its going to pay to invest in them, to support them with more efficient tools and processes, to upgrade, re-equip and refresh the source of your profits.

Or are you planning to keep the same ones for 100 years?

February 28, 2020

Working to a pattern

It’s hard to imagine making any garment successfully without having a pattern to work to and a picture of what the finished product should look like.

Yet we expect our teams to do exactly that every day.

With predictably ill-fitting results.

February 27, 2020

For the want of a nail

We like to blame disasters on the failure of equipment – the horseshoe nail, the cladding, the electrical wiring. Or we like to blame people – the farrier, the cladding manufacturer, the maintenance department.

But neither of those things are really to blame when things go disastrously wrong. It’s the processes that have failed, and often much further back than the site of the problem. The rider didn’t check his horse’s shoes (or maybe the farrier ran out?), the specifier chose inappropriate cladding (or maybe the budget was too low?), management reduced the capacity of the maintenance department (or maybe the maintenance team had caught coronavirus?).

It’s what we do – the processes we run – that delivers results, good or bad. If we want to minimise the bad and maximise the good, we all need to see them clearly and take responsibility for keeping the whole in good working order.

February 25, 2020

Renewable energy

By convention, everyone inside a business tracks the boss. Orders come down from on high, performance data is sent back up the line to the top. Orders are adjusted and sent back down again. New performance data is sent back up the line. And so on.

Who does the boss track? In a public company, it’s often the share price. The opinion of the financial markets, of potential traders in those shares – not investors, they rarely hold shares long enough to be truly investors.

What if everyone in the business tracked the people they serve instead?

They’d be powered by a completely renewable energy that’s also sustainable and efficient.

February 21, 2020

The Law of Attraction

I’ve never seen Anthropologie, the retail chain, advertise. They don’t waste their time, money or energy putting themselves in front of people who aren’t interested in what they have to offer.

Instead they have identified very clearly who it is they want to attract into their stores, then created stores that are magnetic to that kind of person. You either walk past an Anthropologie store, or you walk in. And if you walk in, it’s very likely that you’ll buy something.

It goes even deeper though. Anthropologie’s promise is to send their clients out of the store looking and feeling fabulous. And they are prepared to forego short-term sales to achieve this.

When I was at business school we were told the story of one store that sacked their ‘best’ salesperson. The salesperson was great at selling, but at the expense of sending the customer home with clothing that didn’t make them look and feel great.

For the people Anthropologie serves, Anthropologie’s aim is become part of who they are. Nothing less will do. They wait patiently for the right people to find them, then keep their promise to them religiously. The result is a growing community of enthusiasts.

That’s not magic, that’s dedication.

February 19, 2020

A productivity problem

This week, my husband took his father on a 90-mile round trip to see a consultant, only to be told “We don’t do that here.”

Why?

For the same reason a jury of 12 people can hang around for days waiting for a case, only to file into a courtroom and be told “We can’t try this case now.”

Because the process has been designed around the wrong role.

No wonder we have a productivity problem.

February 13, 2020

Extending the franchise

Enfranchisement: verb (used with object), en·fran·chised, en·fran·chis·ing.

to grant a franchise to; admit to citizenship, especially to the right of voting.
to endow (a city, constituency, etc.) with municipal or parliamentary rights.
to set free; liberate, as from slavery.

Franchising creates a business within a business, where the management of a branch of the original business is outsourced to a third party, who pays for the privilege.

Franchising works because it balances autonomy with responsibility. If I buy a franchise, I own that business, I get to keep most of the profit, I manage my branch as I see fit. At the same time I have a responsibility to the parent business and my fellow-franchisees to maintain and even enhance the brand.

For this reason, good franchisors recognise that they need to communicate ‘how their business works’ to franchisees. Not just technical stuff, such as how to put together a pizza or prescribe a pair of glasses, but the customer experience stuff too. Sometimes, if my potential franchisees are unlikely to be business owners already, even how to monitor business performance. Then they let the franchisee get on with it.

A good franchise takes a lot of effort to set up, but once set up it is relatively straightforward and quick to replicate and expand. Done properly, franchising is a brilliant way to grow a business without killing yourself in the process.

It’s possible to give yourself a head start.

Enfranchise the people inside your business first.

February 5, 2020

Triage

One reason why we can feel overwhelmed at work, is that we don’t use triage enough.

Simple triage for unexpected client phone calls and emails:

If you can answer their question or address their issue in 5 minutes, deal with it now, preferably by phone.
If it is urgent deal with it now. Have a clear, tangible definition of what ‘urgent’ means. Don’t rely on the client’s perception.
If it’s not urgent and you genuinely have time to deal with it now (i.e. doing so won’t delay any other client’s work or eat into your rest time), deal with it now, preferably by phone.
Otherwise, schedule time to deal with it and schedule a call with them to give your response. It helps to keep an hour or so set aside every day to schedule these into. That way you can keep on top of the work generated, and be clear with your client when they can expect an answer.

Every customer has top priority. That needs managing.

February 4, 2020

Why this? Why you? Why now?

Bernadette Jiwa has a real gift for encapsulating the essence of a problem in few words. I’ve had these 3 questions from a hypothetical customer running round my head for a couple of weeks now, as I work out how to apply them to what I doing.

My new book is out soon, so I thought I’d give answering them a go:

Why this?

Because all the small business owners I’ve met want 3 things:

to do a great job for their customers or clients.
to do right by the people who work for them and with them.
to build a better life for themselves, their families and their communities.

They need to make profit to do that effectively. This book gives ideas for how to approach the first two in a systematically different way, to get more of the third.

Why you?

Because I’ve used this approach to help businesses achieve all 3 of their goals, and I want to teach more business owners how to do it for themselves.

Why now?

Because if we want a better world for everyone (if we want a world we can live in at all), we have to find a better way of doing business. This won’t come from the top, so we small business owners must make it happen from the bottom up.

That was an interesting exercise. What would you answer?

February 3, 2020

Beware the black box.

The great thing about a musical score is that it tells you what to play, not how. It tells you which notes, in which order and at what speed. It can also give you hints about the mood you’ll be trying to create.

What it doesn’t tell you is how to play those notes. It assumes you know. Neither does the score dictate what instrument is used. As long as you produce the right notes, in the right order and at the right speed to produce the required mood, you can play them on anything – from a crumhorn, to an electric guitar, to a computer – and the listener will probably recognise the music.

This is what gives a musical score longevity. It can be picked up centuries after it was originally written, played with completely different instruments by completely different people, yet sound broadly the same as when it was first performed.

Imagine what would have happened if Mozart had simply taught his musicians their parts by rote, tightly coupling the ‘what must happen’ with the ‘how we make it happen at the moment’.

He would have created a black box, that could make music only for as long as the specific players he taught could remember it, or the instruments they used were available. A black box limited by the number of people Mozart could physically teach; that would be impossible to interrogate, update or re-interpret; that would quickly become obsolete.

If you seek longevity or scale for your enterprise, keep ‘what must happen’ separate from ‘how we make it happen at the moment’. Given the ‘what’, future generations will be able to work out ‘how’ for themselves.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise