Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Trust
July 9, 2019

Trust

There’s a visible gap between the hands of the free-falling trapeze artist and those of her companion coming up to catch her.   A gap that makes my stomach lurch just looking at it.

That gap is filled with trust.  Trust that a promise made is a promise kept.

What happens, when trust gets eroded?   When we discover that institutions and corporates aren’t keeping the promises they made?   That the ham we’ve just bought that doesn’t actually contain ham?  The car we’ve just bought puts out more emissions than we were sold?   The pension we were relying on has been appropriated by the firm we’ve worked for for 40 years?  The news we read on social media and in the papers is fake?

When trust disappears, we stop taking risks.   We narrow our perspective.   We lower our expectations.   We start accepting worse instead of expecting better.   Cynicism starts to poison everything.

The only antidote is to make our own promises, the biggest we can, in spite of that stomach-lurching gap, and keep them every time.

People will always want [insert naughty but nice product here]
July 8, 2019

People will always want [insert naughty but nice product here]

Building a business around giving people what they want, even when you know it isn’t good for them, seems like another safe option.  After all, most of us, like Oscar Wilde, can resist anything except tempation.

But what happens, when someone decides to use the ‘want’ as merely a route in, a way to deliver something much more than the immediate gratification of a fleeting desire?

Tony’s Chocolonely doesn’t simply make 100% slave-free chocolate.   Once you’ve know about it, you can’t avoid the question: “Is there slavery in the bar I’m eating now?”.

 

Play
July 5, 2019

Play

“To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.”

That’s when ‘work’ becomes ‘play’.

 

From “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” by David Graeber – well worth a read over the weekend.

Have a good one.

Happy Birthday
July 4, 2019

Happy Birthday

James Lovelock is 100 years old today.

Dr Lovelock is best known for his ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – the idea that living things interact with their non-living environment to create a synergistic, self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life.

The hypothesis has come in for a lot of criticism over the years (after all, it is a hypothesis, not a theory), but the idea of the Earth as a system seems obvious to us now.

This wasn’t the case when Lovelock developed his idea, while working at NASA in the 60’s. And for me, this is the core of his contribution – he gave scientists a new paradigm for thinking about the Earth and our relationship to it, that enabled them to improve our understanding of how it works, and how it might evolve.

That’s quite an achievement.

Happy Birthday Dr Lovelock!

Research
July 3, 2019

Research

I’ve been researching the history and theory of accounting, and I have to say I’m finding it fascinating, not least because it leads off into some very interesting side-alleys.

Along the way I found the Digital Commons Network, an excellent resource.

But the best thing is finding that I’m not wrong about some of the questions I want to ask.

What questions would you ask of Accounting?

Be more Pirate
July 2, 2019

Be more Pirate

I vividly recall one networking meeting where, one after another, 6 accountants stood up and pitched themselves with “You all know what I do, I’m an accountant.  I’m looking for anyone who needs an accountant.”.

No wonder accountants have a reputation for being boring.

They aren’t of course, but until now they have been a key part of the compliance necessary for anyone running a business, which means that in the whole, they haven’t needed to market themselves, let alone differentiate themselves from other accountants.

Now that meeting compliance is being eaten away by automation, forward-thinking accountants are looking for new ways to make themselves necessary, this time based on what the customer wants and needs, not what the regulator requires.

That’s why I’m launching The Pioneers, a club for accountants who want to ‘be more pirate’.

If you know anyone who you think would like to be part of it, please pass this on.

Thank you.

 

Sawubona
July 1, 2019

Sawubona

You can’t be seen until you learn to see.

Sawubona.

Questions
June 28, 2019

Questions

People are asking big questions about accountancy.

Both from a technology perspective, as in this paper from Deloitte, and from a more existential perspective, exemplified by Professor Richard Murphy and the Corporate Accountability Network.

Big changes create great opportunities to re-think our models of the world as consumers and as producers.

Where do you think accountancy should go?   What should accountants do?  For whom?  What do we want from accountants?   Most importantly, what could we want?  What should we want?

Big questions, now is a good time to ask them.

Decisions
June 27, 2019

Decisions

One of the easiest ways to overcomplicate a process that is designed to be run by humans is to spell out every possible decision.

That’s not to say decision trees like the one above aren’t useful in helping people to think through options or scenarios, they are.  But often it’s impossible to pre-identify every possible scenario – especially where other living things are involved – and the attempt to include everything we can imagine in a process simply slows down its execution.

For the most part, simple, black & white, truly binary decisions can be automated.

For everything else we want people to think before they act.   In which case the best instruction starts with “Use your judgement and experience, together with your knowledge of our purpose and values”.