Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Exclusivity
March 26, 2019

Exclusivity

Not everyone wants what you could do for them.

Not everyone who wants what you could do for them, wants the way you do it.

Not everyone who is willing to work for or with you wants to do things ‘the way we do them round here’.

Not everyone who could buy into your franchise wants to follow your system.

But for the ones who do, you are the answer to their prayers, and they’ll tell their friends.

They are why you do what you do, the way you do it.

Find them. Help them find you.

Overhead
March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

Utopia revisited
March 22, 2019

Utopia revisited

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia in it is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a fairer country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

I don’t think we appreciate Oscar’s genius nearly as much is it deserves.

This is my 100th blog. Thank you.

Rules
March 21, 2019

Rules

It’s often said that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. That’s true. But what’s the strategy for maintaining Culture?

Here’s mine:

  1. An explicit Promise of Value: principles, behaviours, values, purpose, “the way we do the thing we’re here to do”.
  2. Customer-focused Roles: the parts played in delivering the Promise, “how what we’re doing now relates to our customer”
  3. A floor: the lower bound of what’s acceptable, “the least we should do”.
  4. Process: what has to happen in order to deliver the outcomes that share and keep our Promise, “our score”.

The autonomous enterprise doesn’t need a ruler, but it does need rules.

Manège
March 20, 2019

Manège

According to my Chambers dictionary, this is the probable origin of the word ‘Manage’, deriving from the 16th century Italian ‘Maneggio’.

It’s a lovely word, unless perhaps you’re the horse.

The other interesting thing I learned this morning is that the space where you get a horse to walk/trot/run in circles around you is called a ‘carrousel’.

Control Freaks
March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

An impossible choice
March 18, 2019

An impossible choice

Your business eats you up. It takes all your energy and focus, you worry about it even when you’re not there, so you might as well stay there, making sure its working as it should day-in, day-out. But oh, sometimes, you’d love to just walk away.

Your business is your creation. You imagined it into being, worked hard to get it to where it is. You want it to be a reflection of your values and beliefs, you want it to be bigger and better. Some time, you’d love it to be your legacy.

It seems like an impossible choice – between your business or your life.

But it is also possible to have a business that represents you, without you having to be there, so you and everyone else in your business can enjoy life more.

In the autonomous enterprise, discipline makes daring possible.

Company
March 15, 2019

Company

“An autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”

Sounds like a pretty good place to work.

Compliance
March 13, 2019

Compliance

The need to satisfy a regulator, or meet legally binding deadlines creates a difficult balancing act for professional service firms.

The regulator’s process is easy to see, so it is much easier to build a business around satisfying their requirements. Effectively the firm becomes not much more than an interface, taking information from a widely disparate set of clients and reshaping it to meet a required format.

One danger is that if every firm looks like this, prospects are going to buy on price.

Another is that once compliance can be automated or outsourced, the firm’s purpose effectively disappears.

Now might be a good time to start re-framing.