Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise

Facts are the enemies of truth
August 26, 2021

Facts are the enemies of truth

When you create your own business, the ‘truth’ of why it exists, what it does, who it’s for and how it should work is only in your head.

If you want to grow beyond the impact you can make on your own, you have to find a way to communicate and transfer that truth to the heads of your collaborators.

At that point, we tend to replace our truth with facts.   Facts are controlling, dry, objective, soulless.   We try to flesh the truth out as much as possible by adding too many facts, hiding the very thing we need to reveal.

No wonder people resist, preferring to follow their own idea of the truth – however different that may be from yours.   What’s really needed is a way to position your truth in the space between the people who work together to deliver it.   That way everyone can access it, everyone can question it, everyone can improve it.

Your truth is your Promise of Value.   The space between the people who work together to deliver it is your business.

Make a map of that space that describes how you make and keep your Promise to the people the business serves.   Keep the facts minimal – just enough to indicate concrete action;  allow the truth to shine through.

Leave room for interpretation, dissent and discussion.   Then make sure there’s a process for reaching consensus around a new, better truth.   That’s how your business will grow and evolve.

 

Thanks to Carlos Saba, for introducing me to the book that inspired this post.  It’s well worth a read.

Sharing
August 12, 2021

Sharing

I’m one of seven children.  A lot of work for my mother, who was nominally ‘The Boss’ in our house.

She didn’t like it though.

She resented being the parent who had to get us to do homework, or tidy our rooms, or do the washing up.  She resented being the one who shouted and told us off.   She resented the fact that her contribution was taken for granted, invisible, unappreciated.  Most of all she resented being the one who had to think of everything, for everyone else.

Fortunately for my mum, and as I realised later, for us, she went on strike when she was in her mid 40’s.

From that point on, if we were 16 or over, we took responsibility for ourselves.   If we wanted washing done, we did it ourselves.   If we wanted clothes ironed, we did it ourselves.  If we didn’t like ironing, then we could choose clothes that didn’t need ironing.  If we didn’t like tidying our bedrooms, we could live in a mess.  If we wanted a different meal from everyone else, we could, as long as we planned and cooked it and washed up ourselves.

It was hard for my mum, because it meant we did quite often live in a mess, but it showed me at least that beyond a certain age, a family, like a small business is a collaborative affair.  And that this collaboration works best when its the responsibility that’s shared, not just the work.

Being ‘The Boss’ isn’t as nearly as much fun as people think.

The solution is to make everyone the boss of themselves, within a framework of shared purpose.  Everyone is better for it.  Especially the business.

What’s wrong with being a boss?
August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do.   Often they also tell you how to do it.    A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’.   And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how.  It’s uncomfortable.  It feels wrong.  Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family.  You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable.  If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss.   Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too.  So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

Less is more
August 9, 2021

Less is more

Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars?   Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices.   And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?

As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.

In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam.  Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.

More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from.  But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.

The lesson for packaging your Promise?

If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice.  If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard.  They’ll probably give up.

500 percent
August 6, 2021

500 percent

I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.

It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.

Here’s my takeaway from reading it:

Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:

  1.  They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.”    In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
  2.  They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework.     In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
  3. They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards.   Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so.   In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.

As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading.  In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.

If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.

And I’d love to help.

 

 

Handovers
August 5, 2021

Handovers

When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead.  Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them.   Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money.   You’ve introduced transaction costs.   At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give.   So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it.   That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond.  It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun.   What’s not to like?

 

The devil is in the detail
August 2, 2021

The devil is in the detail

Except when it isn’t.

Often, the devil is in the big picture.  The model you’re working to.  Unquestioningly, perhaps even unconsciously.

That’s what Julian and Andrew realised at Matt Black Systems.  After a decade of attempts to turn around their business, with LEAN consultants, re-organisations, and efficiency drives, none of which worked, the devil wasn’t in the fine detail of processes, nor was it in the employees.  It was in the model the business was built on – top-down, hierarchical, siloed into specialisms, command and control.

Alternative models aren’t necessarily easy, but they give you the opportunity to choose your problems:

“The organisational design you adopt will determine the set of problems you have to live with.  Often the design is considered a ‘given’ its problems unavoidable.  We chose to change our model because the problems we had were threatening our business.  We wanted a better set of problems.”

Once Andrew and Julian had realised this, it took just 18 months to transform their business to the point where productivity had increased by 500%; customers were delighted, and staff found their work rewarding personally and financially, without killing themselves in the process.

Julian and Andrew could leave the building, never to return.

Of course, business-threatening problems are a great spur to radical change.   But you don’t have to wait till then.

You could pick your problems early, and walk out of your business when you choose.

Even brilliant businesses fail in the end
July 2, 2021

Even brilliant businesses fail in the end

A butcher’s shop Deptford is closing down soon.

No big deal you might think.

Except this butcher’s is a family firm that’s been going for 192 years.  Their pies, home-made, filled with succulent chunks of meat and delivious gravy are legendary.  Their T-bone steak has topped the leaderboard of the Steak Society’s ‘T-bone Tour’ since 2018.  And it’s all surprisingly good value too.

It will disappear just when the market for it’s wares is growing as Deptford gentrifies.

But the current owner, Bill Wellbeloved, needs to retire, and couldn’t find anyone to take over the business.

Even brilliant family businesses fail in the end, if they don’t find a way to last longer than their current driving force.

That’s why Gibbs & Partners exists.  So brilliant businesses can carry on for as long as their clients need them.

Acumen
June 21, 2021

Acumen

Acumen:  Sharpness.  The ability to get right to the point, to the heart of the matter.

Acumen is something Jaqueline Novogratz obviously has in spades, because she realises that the people at the bottom of the pile have it too.

And that the best way them to help them is to enable them to apply it to help themselves.

Bottom up, ripple out.  That’s the way to do it.

No need for you to be there.

 

On kings and forgiveness.
June 4, 2021

On kings and forgiveness.

Seth wrote a very interesting blog this week on Monarchists.

“As Sahlins and Graeber outline in their extraordinary (and dense) book on Kings, there’s often a pattern in the nature of monarchs. Royalty doesn’t have to play by the same cultural rules, and often ‘comes from away.’ Having someone from a different place and background allows the population to let themselves off the hook when it comes to creating the future.”

I agree, but I think the whole thing is more subtle and interesting than that.

Kings ‘from away’ could act in ways that were totally unacceptable to the native population – in order to create change.   Sometimes, they were even asked in.

Beyond that though, those same Kings were contained and constrained into a purely formal role.  They became figureheads, cherished, personally pampered but essentially powerless over the society they ‘ruled’.  They didn’t administer the results of their change and they certainly didn’t take over resources.   The original population carried on as custodians of the land, society and cuture, as before.

That was the point.

A stranger king enabled a system based on shared authority and collective, consensual decision making to radically change without breaking itself apart.   You could almost call them a scapegoat rather than a king.  Nowadays we’d call them a consultant.

The challenge then, is not merely to be prepared to ‘put yourself on the hook’ to lead change that will make the community uncomfortable, but also to forgive those of your peers who do it for you.