Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 36 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged. If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service. Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible. Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable. Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

January 13, 2023

Regulation is feedback too

It may not feel like it, but regulation is simply another form of feedback for your business. It just happens to be the kind of feedback you are not allowed to ignore.

Think of it as feedback from your industry. Lessons learned by others that can save you grief. Of course not all of it is designed to help your business, sometimes it’s the result of bigger players flexing their muscle in the market, to make it harder for businesses like yours. Even that is useful feedback – telling you where the bigger players feel vulnerable. Use it to your advantage.

Since you can’t ignore regulatory feedback, it pays to have a really clear Promise, and plenty of the other kinds of feedback coming in regularly, so that you can make sure the requirements of regulation can’t unduly distort your unique way of making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.

That means that as far as possible, compliance, like admin, needs to be a side effect of doing what you’re here to do, not the other way around.

Of course you need to be compliant, but the regulator shouldn’t come first.

They’re not your customer.

January 12, 2023

Bottom up, inside out

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

Somewhere back in the 15th century, probably unintentionally, we remade our world, creating a system we now call capitalism.

This system is so good at reproducing itself it now includes everyone and everything on Earth – and even beyond. Whether they like it or not.

We’ve trapped ourselves inside a system that is good for some, very bad for others and terrible for our planet.

It wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. We can change the system.

But how? Especially when the people at the top are those that benefit most?

Our small businesses are worlds we make and can easily remake.

Why not start there? Build a tiny version of the kind of world you’d like to see: democratic, participatory, responsibly autonomous, humane, non-extractive. Liberating.

Bottom up, inside out.

Until one day, we are the new system.

January 11, 2023

A disappearing act

You don’t have to lose your business to be able to leave it.

You just have to take yourself out of the day-to-day.

To do this, make everyone a boss. Get the music that’s in your head written down so that other people can play it. Give your people the responsibility and the autonomy to deliver your business’s unique customer experience consistently, in their own style.

The sooner you do this, the sooner you get to choose how much time you want to spend in your business, the sooner you free the business to grow and the sooner you’ll free your people to grow too.

Best of all, you get to keep everything that makes your business uniquely yours.

In the end, you’ll have built a community, not just a business. A community centred around the promises you make and keep for the people you serve. A community that becomes your legacy.

Ask me how.

The irony is that all this makes it an even more attractive buy.

But of course by then you won’t want to sell.

January 10, 2023

On the shoulders of giants

Jean Hunnisett was a costume designer. Someone whose job it is not just to recreate ‘the look’ of a particular period, but to recreate it in a way that is comfortable and practical for the actor to perform in.

People have changed over the centuries, becoming fuller and taller. Clothes have become lighter and less constricting. Women are no longer used to re-configuring their bodies to suit the current trend by wearing corsets from childhood. So a costume designer’s job is never to simply reproduce historical examples, it is to re-interpret, re-measure and re-size those historical examples to produce the desired effect on screen without crippling the actor.

That’s hard work. And Jean Hunnisett did it. Once it was done, she put it out there for the world to share in her costumes and her books. For people like me and Vivienne Westwood to find.

No matter how unique our genius, how brilliant our vision, we achieve nothing alone. We build on the free gifts of human nature left by those who came before and those who work around us now.

That by no means diminishes our achievements.

But it seems only fair to acknowledge the gifts that enable us.

January 9, 2023

What do you really want?

What do you really want?

I’m willing to bet that it’s something like this:

Agency – to make your own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new capabilities and skills. So you can grow as a human being.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how you make your dent. To do it your way.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than yourself. Otherwise it doesn’t feel like much of a dent.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like me’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where you stand in your communities. That doesn’t by any means have to be at the top. What you really want is recognition.

You can build a successful business by delivering this for your clients through what you give them and the way you do it.

You can build a sustainable business by delivering this for your people through the way that you enable them to deliver to clients on your behalf.

Do both, and you’ve sorted yourself out too.

December 19, 2022

Fake progress

The Mechanical Turk was hailed as a miracle, a step forward in progress, the bleeding edge of innovation. But at it’s heart was a big, fat exploitative lie.

The same is true of many of our current everyday miracles – free delivery, just-in-time manufacturing, ultra-cheap food, computers that fit in our hand.

As yet we have not discovered a way to get something from nothing. Which means that always, someone, somewhere has to do the actual work to make that everyday ‘miracle’ happen. Wearing out their own car at 50p a parcel. Sewing designer clothes in a sweatshop somewhere. Getting paid to vet Facebook posts in a refugee camp – one at a time. Destroying unusable PPS in a prison, or down a poisonous mine extracting the cobalt for your phone.

Just because they’re hidden away in the bowels of the machine doesn’t mean they’re not there.

They shouldn’t be. We don’t need these everyday miracles.

We can work much better ones.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the New Year.

December 16, 2022

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.

“In six months, 300 volunteers from 41 countries worked asynchronously to produce a best-selling book. The Carbon Almanac is now in ten languages. The almanac for kids, Generation Carbon is in 17 languages. There are more than 88 podcasts, a photobook, and a daily e-newsletter.” From Fast Company: “Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss, and everyone’s a leader.“

And dozens more spin-offs too. The enterprise is still going strong, and still growing.

The Carbon Almanac was created this way.

With no managers, no boss. Everyone’s a leader.

Maybe that’s also how Stonehenge was built? And Çatalhöyük or Knossos?

Maybe that’s naturally how we build worthwhile things?

Maybe you could take the load off your own shoulders and reframe your small business into something longer-lasting that way?

Making everyone a boss unleashes amazing energy. Especially when you also give them a lovely firm but springy floor to bounce off.*

Discipline makes Daring possible.

*That’s where I can help.

December 15, 2022

I’m an anarchist. I’m in good company.

“My strongly held belief is that we do not need to operate our organizations with a single strong all-powerful leader perched precariously at the top of a pyramid or power operating in politically-minded ways. Instead we can create a setting in which everyone is expected to think and act like a leader.

Can this work? Commonly held beliefs in most companies would say “no!” Many would argue that having “too many bosses” will inevitably create chaos. It’s often, inaccurately, called “anarchy.” Ironically, the idea that everyone thinks and acts like a caring collaborative leader is exactly what anarchism is all about. Anarchism, despite the popular misconception, is all about organization.

When we do get people to think like leaders, to engage in the difficult work of collaboratively figuring out the right things to do, they begin to choose freely to participate in creating the organization of their future.”

That’s Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses.

A man after my own heart. Who helped Zingerman’s to scale from a single deli to a $65 million Community of Businesses by applying anarchist principles to capitalism.

Check out the Zingerman’s Press website. Or get a taste from this article from Corporate Rebels.

Their newsletter is well worth subscribing to.

If you’d like a little more ‘anarchy’ in your business – whether that’s to enable it to scale or simply to make it a happier place to be, give me a call.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

December 14, 2022

Sceptic

Somewhere in my loft, I have a copy of this book: “The Sceptical Feminist. A philosophical enquiry.” By Janet Radcliffe-Richards.

I bought it in 1982, when the paperback came out, and one thing from it has lived with me ever since:

If a person’s or organisation’s given reason for promoting a particular policy or course of action is shown to be false, you can’t know what the real reason is, but you are entitled to publicly speculate what it might be. And to raise that as a further question. Repeat until you’ve got somewhere near the truth.

The ‘five whys’ approach isn’t just for business problem solving. It’s a habit we should all get into when dealing with those who govern us.

Discipline makes Daring possible.