November 15, 2023
Orchestra or pin factory?
What’s the difference? In a pin factory, people are ‘hands’. In an orchestra, people are players. In a pin factory … Read More “Orchestra or pin factory?”
Category: The Disappearing Boss
November 13, 2023
Masters and management
There was a time when being a Master was to be an expert. To have experience. To have care for … Read More “Masters and management”
November 10, 2023
Why have a score in front of you?
Someone asked an interesting question on James O’Brien’s Mystery Hour phone-in yesterday. It went something like this: “Why do orchestral … Read More “Why have a score in front of you?”
November 7, 2023
Positioning.
‘Positioning’. It’s one of those marketing terms you feel you should know. When you’re networking with other business owners you … Read More “Positioning.”
November 3, 2023
Making practice perfect
It often seems like the best kind of training is ‘on the job’. After all what could be better than … Read More “Making practice perfect”
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 18, 2023
A reminder
Why should I write down my Customer Experience Score, when I have good people working for me, who can work things out for themselves?
Because making good people reinvent your wheel over and over again is a shocking waste of humanity.
Humanity that could be set free to invent even better wheels, and even more exciting uses for them.
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?