Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 4, 2019

What if…

You’ve put your heart and soul into building a remarkable business that does things differently.

Now you’re ready to scale.

But the last thing you want is to sell out to the same-old, same-old, corporate route to growth.

What if there were a new and different way to think about organising and growing your business, that takes the best bits of being small – your customer-focus, your agility, your meaningfulness – and scales the business around these properties, instead of suppressing them in favour of a traditional corporate approach?

What if you could structure your entire business around your own unique way of making and keeping your promise to customers?

What if your business had no management hierarchy, no silos, no ‘overhead’, only people enabled and empowered to share and keep your promise to your customer and to continuously improve how that works?

What if everyone in your business had roles that describe how they contribute to the customer experience, not where they fit into the hierarchy or the machine?

What if people were supported by technology to be more human, not straitjacketed into being less?

What if your business didn’t need you, because it is a living system, that not only works without you, but evolves without you to find new ways of delivering the promise it embodies?

It’s all possible.

You built a remarkable business, you can grow it remarkably too.

If you dare.

January 1, 2019

Earth Story

It’s become a bit of an annual tradition in our house to watch ‘Earth Story’ from beginning to end between Christmas and New Year.

And every year, I find myself thinking about why I enjoy watching it so much.

I love the fact that many of the scientists involved including the presenter, Aubrey Manning, are middle-aged or old. There is wisdom here as well as adventure. Many of these ‘old’ scientists made these exciting discoveries in their youth, and now younger people are following on.

I love that they collaborate so much across the world, feeding off and building on each others’ discoveries (sometimes by accident) to build an incredibly comprehensive picture of how the earth works.

I love that the topic is huge and complex, and that the documentary brings everything together in a way that takes you through the various discoveries and processes involved, until you too say to yourself “So that’s how it works”.

I love that it is a clear, straightforward, scientific, scholarly presentation. There’s no faux jeopardy, no contrived drama, no patronising. The subject is wondrous and dramatic enough to stand on its own. There’s no agenda other than to educate.

And at the end of the 8 hours, I sit back every time and think 3 things:

First, Earth is an amazing place. It’s been going a lot longer than we have, and it will happily carry on for a long while without us.

Second, people are amazing. Look at what we can do – not just the thinking and hypothesising, but the technology that allows us to observe and prove our hypotheses.

Third, there’s nothing we can do about how the planet works. The status quo will not hold forever. Whether we are speeding it up or not, the planet is going to get hotter or colder and cause us enormous difficulties.

So if we want our human story to be part of the earth story for a little longer, the answer has to lie in changing the things we can change – our societies, our priorities, our ways of living together, our ways of living on the planet – we made all these things, we can remake them.

Perhaps we could practise on smaller problems first – hunger, poverty, exploitation, how to enable anyone and everyone to live well, wherever on earth they happen to be?

Here’s to 2019.