You already know you want your employees to own your business.
How about getting them to run it too?
That would enable them to really take ownership.
And if you enable them to do that before you hand it over, you get to go, or stay, as and when you please.
It only takes a year.
A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:
Hint: Most of us stop too soon.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.
Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).
Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.
This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.
Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play, you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.
Discipline makes evolution possible too.
I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.
Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them! Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.
Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex. And this is science.
Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
And so do you.
Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:
What is it be like to be them?
Followed up by a bit of finding out.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
One of our case studies at London Business School, involved a company that supplied rags to industry. Rags – textiles at the absolute end of their useful life might seem to be the ultimate commodity. Almost worthless. How could a business supplying them ever hope to create unmissable value for it’s customers?
Simple.
By surrounding that commodity product with deep layers of service.
By getting under the skin of it’s clients; understanding where and how they used the rags and what the problems could be. Then making sure they more than met every rags need in the way they sold, delivered, collected and disposed of them for the client.
By maintaining that intimacy with their clients through the people they interacted with – the people who delivered and collected, so that every new need could be anticipated and added to the service.
In those days, adding service meant adding people, because people are the only way to create value for other people.
That’s still true, even if nowadays your first thought would be to build an online platform.
Technology doesn’t create new value overall, it can only make it cheaper for a particular business to deliver its service – until another particular business catches up or overtakes, or undercuts (Ever wondered why hand car washes have replaced the automated ones? Cheap (slave) labour, makes machinery unprofitable).
So if the key to profitability is service, and service means adding people to deal with people, maybe we have an answer to the climate crisis?
Stop making things, use what we already have (e.g. enough clothing for 3 times the global population), and pay people well to support other people – regenerating our environment; housing; education; health; repair and recycling; art; music, entertainment… the list is endless.
We wouldn’t be short of work, and we might well be happier.
After all, this is how we did things for most of our existence on this planet.
One day we might realise we don’t even need money to make this work.
Of course, if you embed your unique promise of value into the way your business works well before you decide to exit, you get all the benefits of exit, without actually having to do it.
You can even continue to grow your business at the same time.
Applied at the right time, Discipline really does make Daring possible.
When my mother sold her architect-designed corner-plot bungalow, the buyers told her they were aiming to set up their son in it. They quibbled over everything, nibbled away at the asking price until in the end, she sold for much less than she’d hoped.
Then they knocked it down and built 3 new executive homes on the plot.
There are many reasons why a trade buyer would want your business.
If you care about what happens to it, to your staff and to your clients after you’ve exited, it’s worth knowing what those reasons could be, because buyers are not necessarily going to tell you:
Whatever the reason, they’ll usually want you to stay on as a consultant, and the final price will be dependent on performance during the transition. And all too often that transition destroys value, while you have to watch it happen.
Just as it’s easier to protect the value of your house by making sure it’s in tip-top condition with everything working like clockwork, it’s easier to protect your business’s value if you’ve systemised it. Even easier if you’ve also documented that system in a Customer Experience Score.
Doing so also opens up other exit opportunities:
Build your unique promise of value into the way your business works before you sell, that way you’ll get to realise it all and leave a legacy other will recognise as yours.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Big businesses (or perhaps just their shareholders) crave nothing more than the certainty of increasing profits. That’s what capitalism means.
To that end, they put a hard boundary around their businesses, turning them into closed systems, where everything is rigidly controlled, organised to maximise profit and nothing else.
The trouble is that a closed system cannot learn. So when the life around that business changes (as it certainly will) the only way for a closed-system business to deliver the certainty it promises to shareholders is first, to eat itself, generating ‘shareholder value’ by shrivelling it’s own organs, or selling them; or, worse, to seek to impose control onto its surroundings, turning them as rigid and sterile as itself.
Good businesses, the ones that get to stay big and profitable without financial or geopolitical engineering, are those that put a border around themselves instead.
Borders are permeable. They allow new ideas in, act as an early warning system for change, create a safe space for experimentation. They turn a closed system into an open one, yet retain enough control to allow a business to choose which changes they adopt, on purpose.
The best businesses add a twist to this.
They create themselves as an open system for making and keeping promises – not to shareholders, but to their customers. Profits become a side-effect of the system’s purpose. And ironically, become more certain.
They stick to their promise, always learning from their customers and their team what the world outside wants, and re-package their promise to meet that demand, adjusting the way the share and keep it along the way.
Great businesses constantly balance order with openness to get the best of both worlds, a business that can thrive forever, whatever the circumstances.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
In ‘The Uncertainty Mindset’, Vaughn Tan describes an interesting situation:
The assistant chef responsible for the popular lunchtime canelloni dish can’t keep up, and despite following instructions can’t consistently get the finished dish to look as it should, so some are sent back. This goes on for weeks.
It takes the owner walking past one lunchtime to spot the problem, discuss the problem with the assistant chef, then take the problem off to the experimental kitchen team for fixing.
It makes some sense for an innovative, high-end kitchen, operating at the cutting edge of dining to separate innovation from the everyday. A busy restaurant needs to run like clockwork, there’s no room during service for experimentation.
But not every problem needs a separate crack team to solve it. Given a bit of space and time outside normal service (more staff working shorter shifts), the assistant chef and their peers could probably have arrived at the same solution, which was a different method of assembly, that took up less time, less space and produced a more consistent result. Only if that failed should the problem have perhaps been passed across to the experimental team for a deeper look at the recipe.
Given regular space and time outside normal service, the restaurant team could solve many such problems, eventually including recipe problems, learning from each other as they go until each of them is able to tweak the process almost seamlessly. That way, the regular team also becomes the crack team.
That’s an idea that’s not just for restaurants.
When your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use. That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.
The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity. To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.
Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.
All you need to do is to build the firm core:
First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:
Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:
Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:
Make sure you gather feedback:
Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:
Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty. You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.
Discipline makes Daring possible