Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 133 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

November 12, 2018

By their fruits…

You can probably complete that sentence.

For me, it means that it isn’t the badge you wear that tells people what you stand for, it’s what you do and how you behave. The badge is just our shortcut for knowing what to expect.

Of course, over time, the badge becomes a proxy for the behaviour, and if you’re cynical you can exploit this fact.

So yesterday, our towns were festooned with poppies, and our TV schedules rammed with Remembrance, while actual ex-servicemen are homeless, in prison or committing suicide, and many who lost their lives, parents, or childhoods in the last war are seeing the social contract they fought to bring about being dismantled before their very eyes.

Yes, you can get away with just wearing the badge, but eventually, the doing will out.

That’s true for businesses too.

November 9, 2018

Education

When we first moved into our house 30 years ago, there was a Safeways supermarket in the high street. Every night there were bargains to be had, as fresh food was marked down for quick sale. Every Christmas, the fresh turkeys sat on the shelves until Christmas Eve, when, seemingly out of the blue, a gang of eager shoppers would hover around the shop assistant as they marked those same turkeys down for a quick sale.

Within a couple of years, Safeways had gone. I wasn’t surprised.

Today, with the barrage of Christmas advertising already well under way, I spotted ‘Christmas Eve Boxes’ in the window of a pop-up Christmas shop.

How long will it be before we’re giving ‘1st of December boxes’?

And how long before we’re complaining that “Young people today can’t do deferred gratification”?

November 8, 2018

Two views on franchising

Some people think that successful franchises can only be built on a certain kind of business – one where the job can be reduced to something like painting by numbers, or following a sequence of pictures – e.g. making pizzas or burgers, cleaning cars or ovens or fixing windscreen chips.

This view is based on the notion that franchising is all about systemising (“Macdonaldising”) work procedures down to the nth degree of detail so that you can get inexperienced and therefore cheap people to do it – almost off the street. These people might as well be robots (and almost certainly will be soon).

I think there’s a much more interesting way to think of franchising. Which is that it supports a form of responsible autonomy – enabling a skilled, competent individual to use their judgement to deliver consistently excellent service, without the need for detailed procedures, because they understand how everything they do contributes to an overall process of winning and serving a client.

The first view forces people to follow a specific, spelled-out system, which as a result becomes very easy to copy.

The second builds a system that supports people to be people, which makes it pretty well impossible to copy, and capable of delivering much higher value. It also makes it much more fun to be part of.

November 7, 2018

We wunt be druv

From an audience viewpoint, Lewes Bonfire feels wild, raw, exciting and a bit pagan.

There are flaming torches; painted banners; bangers randomly going off; whole chains of firecrackers engulfing the crowd in noise and smoke; drummers; brass bands; giant effigies of the latest hate-figures, destined for burning; marchers in costumes that have clearly been handed down over generations or in their trademark stripey smugglers jumpers and white trousers. Entire familes take part – from babies (always miraculously sleeping through the din) to 80 year olds and upwards.

It’s what isn’t there that makes it something really special. There are no safety barriers between the parade and the audience, no obvious officials marshalling the participants or the crowd. There are people collecting donations for each Bonfire Society as it passes by, but by and large the marchers ignore phones and cameras, until finally it dawns on me that the main thing that’s missing is any kind of ‘playing to the crowd’.

Bonfire isn’t a show put on for the tourists. It’s the continuation of a 405-year protest by a community – represented by the local bonfire societies who plan, fundraise and self-organise an annual defense of the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

It isn’t fake.

People like us do things like this.

November 6, 2018

Reverse engineering

In his new book, Seth Godin talks about the lock and the key. The lock is your ideal client, and the key is your offer – the promise you are making to those people.

Of course, the ideal way to start a business is to identify the locks you want, then build a key to fit, but most of us don’t do that – we make our key, then run around trying as many locks as we can to see if we can find a match.

That’s a terrible way to build a business – looking for ‘anyone’ and ‘everyone’ that might conceivably be interested in what we offer, and as a result finding that the only thing we can compete on is price.

The good news though, is that even if you haven’t thought about which locks you really want, you can use the key you’ve already made to reverse engineer what they look like, so you can systematically help them to find you.

Because people don’t really buy what you do, they buy the feeling you give them through your unique way of doing it.

November 5, 2018

What is a business?

Today, I’m going to bake a delicious, sticky ginger cake for my family and friends to eat on Bonfire night.

That’s a promise. I’ll keep it.

Whether or not I’ve lived up to that promise, only time and the reaction of my friends will tell. I’m not asking for payment, so it doesn’t matter that much to me (as long as nobody gets ill), and I don’t have to repeat the process of baking my cake and feeding it to my friends unless I want to.

For a business, however, it’s different.

All the business owners I know work very hard to keep the promises they make.

Take the owners of Maya’s Craft Bakery near me.

They start at 3 am, to make sure they have a counter full of delicious baked goods by 9 am, so that customers can exchange their cash for the chance to relive a holiday moment; treat themselves or a friend; reward their colleagues, or show their boss how discerning they are.

They clearly keep their promises, because pretty much everything’s sold out by 5pm.

Then they start again the next morning.

There are a lot of ways to think about a business – most of which seem to revolve around making money, but it seems to me that the small businesses I know have it right – a business is a system for repeatedly making a promise to your customers and keeping it.

You can tell it’s a system, because the ones that succeed, like the people at Maya’s Craft Bakery, find they’ve built a feedback loop that makes growth happen organically.

It seems simple, but keeping a business system like this going well isn’t easy.

November 2, 2018

Complexity

How do you eat an elephant?

“One bite at a time!”

“From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” – Peter M. Senge “The Fifth Discipline”

If you only look at your business in bitesize chunks, you’re likely to miss the elephant in the room.

November 1, 2018

Structure

When you start your business, on your own, or as a small team of people who know each other well, it’s easy to remember why you’re doing the work, and who it’s for. It’s also easy to coordinate what you’re doing together so you’re efficient and profitable.

But once you get bigger than that, some sort of structure is needed, to make coordination possible at a larger scale.

For most of us, a hierarchy of management seems like the natural choice. It’s what we’ve grown up with. It’s what gets lauded in the press or shown on “The Apprentice”.

It isn’t the only choice though. There are other ways to enable coordination at scale – co-operation, LEAN, TEAL, Responsible Autonomy, that have been shown to be more effective than traditional hierarchy.

Here’s some questions to ask:

Do I want people to focus on ‘the boss’ or on ‘the customer’?
Do I want everyone to remember why they do what they do?
Do I want to grow my people as I grow my business?
Do I want people to follow procedure or take initiative?
Do I want my people to be obedient or responsible?

It’s easy to lose your values and your customer in the wrong structure.

October 31, 2018

Autonomy Rules

Take away permanent contracts, well-signposted career paths, and guaranteed salaries – what do you get?

Independence. Autonomy. Autonomy with the sole responsibility to survive, and if possible, thrive, by my measures, on my terms.

Everyone’s a freelancer now.

If you’re an organisation with opportunities to grow, you’re going to have to find new ways to recruit them to your cause.

Command and control won’t cut it any more (not even in the army)

Purpose, agency, mastery and self-fulfilment will.

This is a great opportunity to re-think the structure of your business.

The good news is you can make it better for everyone.

October 30, 2018

The Millennial Mis-match

I hear a lot from fellow small business owners about millennials and their younger successors, mostly not good.

“arrogant and entitled.”

“the attention span of a goldfish”

“think they can choose when and where they work.”,

“think they should have a say in everything.”

“won’t be told.”

“can’t stick at anything.”,

“don’t distinguish between life at work and life outside work.”

“aren’t responsible.”

“always letting me down”

I think it’s unlikely that young people today are that different from me at their age.

It’s more likely that there is a simple mismatch of what ‘work’ means.

Like me, millennials crave agency, meaning, mastery and self-fulfilment. They also crave connection. They want to collaborate and co-create, not work for.

They want responsibility.

So why not call their bluff?

Give them responsibility, and the autonomy to deliver on it.

Support them, create feedback mechanisms that tell you and them how they’re doing.

Reward them for the results they deliver, not for being ‘at work’.

It worked for me, and you never know, you might just please everyone.