The Disappearing Boss – Page 44 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 16, 2020

Succession planning

We usually take a regal, personal view of succession in a business. An heir is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.

This approach is fraught with difficulties. 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. The heir we choose may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. There may not be anyone already in the business that we want to be our heir.

There is a more rational, systemic approach.

Build a business around a clearly defined customer experience process, that gives people the confidence to know what they are doing without constraining their personality and individuality. Give people clear roles to play and all the resources at their fingertips to play them well. 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, giving you more options for succession, including sale at its full value. You could even leave it to your employees.

Now there’s a legacy to be proud of.

March 12, 2020

Money trees

Professional gardeners often advise on how to buy the best trees. Choose something healthy and bushy, with plenty of growth potential. Choose a plant that’s actually in flower – that way you know it will look as you want. Check the roots to see if they are vibrant. All good.

It’s the advice that follows that’s harder to take: Take off any flowers or fruit. Trim back the branches. Trim the roots. Keep it weed-free, feed it regularly and prune it carefully until it’s mature.

The idea behind this is that a) the plant is more able to cope with the shock of being moved from pot to garden and b) by sacrificing growth now, we get more, better growth later, and a much better contribution to the garden. Given the right treatment at the start, and the right kind of nurturing as it grows, a tree will embed itself beautifully into its garden and last for years. It will scale. Then it will more or less look after itself.

You could say a business is like a tree – a money tree if you like. A focus on growth (especially rapid growth) can can undermine its health and leave it susceptible to the next hurricane that blows. Much better to spend some initial effort making it scaleable.

Then you can sit back and enjoy it.

March 9, 2020

Out of touch

Before mobile phones, you had no choice about being out of touch outside working hours. You either got everything done during the working day or you didn’t. Even if you worked late, you could properly relax at home.

If you knew you were going to be away from your desk for a few days, you left it so that someone else in the office could pick up a call and handle things in your absence. You could concentrate on the job you were actually doing.

If you needed to get a report written or a complex spreadsheet set up, you deliberately took yourself out of reach of the banter, ‘quick questions’ and interruptions. You could give the job the attention it deserved.

All of this made us more productive, not less. And we were probably less anxious and stressed too.

Now, putting yourself out of touch has to be intentional.

And it’s a skill worth learning, for everyone’s sake.

March 6, 2020

Silver lining?

I wonder how many people will be working from home over the next few months? And how many of the professional service businesses they work for, like accountants, solicitors, surveyors, architects, will realise that this is a completely practicable way of working?

Of course, it will focus the minds of everyone in the business on what really matters on measuring performance – deliverables and results rather than attendance or time spent, and it may require support tools to be put in place (nowadays easily and cheaply available on the cloud).

But if they do this, many businesses will realise that they can trust their teams to do what’s needed, when it’s needed, without surveillance, and that may mean they start looking at how they can support responsible autonomy even more effectively.

That could be a deep silver lining to the coronavirus cloud.

March 5, 2020

Be more mushroom

A mushroom is a metaphor for a short-lived momentary thing, that springs up quickly and dies just as quickly.

Yet this mushroom behaviour is deceptive, because the mushroom is founded on something much bigger and more durable. A mycelium.

A mycelium is a wonderful thing. It connects each and every mushroom within its network to every other, across space and time. They share a common genesis, even through they may pop up in very different habitats.

What’s more, each mushroom (if not picked early) throws out spores, also invisible, that spreads the network even further, until you have something like the mycelium in Nevada that covers over 800 hectares of ground, and is over 2,000 years old.

Not a bad model for a movement, or for a business that aspires to become a movement.

Be more mycelium.

It’s easier to do than you think.

Huge thanks to the open food network UK for letting me borrow their metaphor.

March 4, 2020

What does every business owner want?

A shortcut. More profit for less effort. The only way to achieve that is to create more value for your … Read More “What does every business owner want?”

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.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss