Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 37 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

December 13, 2022

How to build the business of your dreams

How to build the business of your dreams:

Start by handcrafting the product or service of your customer’s dreams.
Then help them live that dream so they will tell you more.
Grow customer by customer until it hurts.
Then work out which parts you need to automate to get big AND keep the handcrafted feel.

This is my TL:DR of the first episode of Reid Hoffman’s ‘Masters of Scale’ podcast. “Do things that don’t scale”.

I love it because it focusses on the ‘handcrafted’ nature of extraordinary customer experience. It takes time to do this as a startup. It takes hard work. It takes getting your hands dirty. It hurts.

I also love it because of the way it talks about automation and scaling.

To scale, automate the bits that make delivering the customer experience hard. Automate the admin, not the experience. So, for example, Airbnb makes it easy for a host to be an extraordinary host, not by taking them out of the equation, but by making everything else in the equation disappear into the background.

It’s well worth a listen – or a read of the transcript if you’re in a hurry.

I’d love to know what you think of it.

Of course I would add: Share how to create the handcrafted part of the experience with your team through a Customer Experience Score – and make sure that’s a floor. With no ceiling. A springboard, not a ball and chain.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

December 12, 2022

Execution

12 Dec 2022 —

Majid reza Rahnavard was hanged in public today. He was sentenced to death because he was one of the protesters of the Islamic regime in Iran.

How long before the executions start here in the UK?

Don’t say “It’ll never happen here“

You can already be imprisoned for protesting peacefully, and the government is making it harder for the young to vote in elections.

We didn’t think that could happen here either.

Here’s the petition started by Raheleh Behzadi in Sweden. Please sign while you can.

December 9, 2022

Recycling

The reason we pay tolls on estuary crossings like Dartford, Humber and Cardiff, is because until very recently, most freight got shipped along our coasts. Anyone who could afford a carriage and later a car, could also afford to go the long way round.

There’s no reason we couldn’t transport most of our freight coastally again, except that we tend to assume that progress only takes one route. That we must ditch everything we ever did before, and use only new things.

That’s not true of course, we can recycle ideas, methods and technologies from the past.

And knowing what we know now, make them work better.

December 8, 2022

The day the earth caught fire

Last night I watched “The day the earth caught fire” a 1961 film about what happens when mankind, pursuing their own petty rivalries, makes an irreversible and deadly change to the only planet they have. I enjoyed it, not least for recognising a young (and uncredited) Michael Caine as a police constable.

But for the situation we’re in now – where mankind, pursuing their own petty interests, have made an irreversible and deadly change to the only planet we have, there’s a much better film.

“Beyond Zero” tells the story of how a carpet manufacturing business turns itself from “a plunderer of the earth and a legal thief” into a highly succesful circular business that gives back more than it takes.

It’s inspiring, hopeful and above all, practical. I thoroughly recommend finding a way to watch it. Preferably with your team, your business peers and maybe even you community.

It’s not too late, but we need to take action now, and we need to take it together. This film shows one way we can.

December 7, 2022

Supported Display

I took a lot of photos on my visit to the Museum of London at the weekend. Some, because I liked the thing I was looking at, this one because I liked the way the display system worked.

It’s a very simple system. A regular grid of holes at the back allows supports to be positioned in a variety of ways to suit what’s being displayed, from a single bronze shield found in the Thames, to a mix of bronxe daggers and swords, to these flint hand tools. It’s highly structured, yet flexible and very effective.

But what I really liked about it was the way it’s been designed to foreground the objects, providing each one with reliable support, allowing them to seem to float; putting each one in the spotlight, so that you can appreciate the differences between them as well as the similarities.

You know where I’m going with this.

With the almost invisible support of a Customer Experience Score, your people too can shine in the spotlight – both as individuals and as part of the whole that is your business.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

This I just liked, because it reminded me of Geraldine McEwan.

December 6, 2022

Hoarding

Around 2,000 years ago, someone buried their cash. Did it do them any good that way? Almost certainly not. Could … Read More “Hoarding”

December 5, 2022

Trespassing

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been intrigued by the use of the word ‘trespass’ in the King James version of the Lord’s prayer – “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us”.

Why not ‘sin’, ‘wrongdoing’, ‘misbehaviour’, ‘offence’, ‘crime’?

The word ‘trespass’ has a very specific meaning – to cross a boundary into a space that belongs to someone else. So why pick this word?

Perhaps because, in 1611, at the very dawn of capitalism, the authors wanted to remind us of the mutuality of our existence. The fact that any rights we have as individuals must be bounded by the rights of others.

I am free to do whatever I like, as long as that doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s right to do whatever they like. Which means in practice, that I must constantly consider others, present and future, in everything I do.

It seems to me that’s as true of a business or organisation just as much as an individual.

December 2, 2022

Ephemeral, permanent

There is something glorious about ephemeral art – elaborate and carefully worked sandcastles, pavement art, papier-mâché effigies.

All the love and care that goes into creating them, just to be burnt or washed away. As if we are celebrating our unique human ability to imagine and build a new world within our world every day.

We don’t necessarily think of our businesses as temporary. We build the version of the world we’d like to see, assuming that we will be around tomorrow to repair or tweak. Until suddenly, we’re gone. And all too often our creations die with us, or not long after.

We forget that we too are ephemeral.

Maybe this is how it should be. But it takes more than one lifetime to change the world. So if that’s what you’re trying to achieve, you need to build your business around something more permanent than you.

Luckily, it’s possible to retro-fit the framework you need.

Discipline makes permanence possible.

Ask me how.

December 1, 2022

The politics of value

“The ultimate stakes of politics, … is not the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is.

Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what makes life worth living.

In the end then, politics is about the meaning of life.” David Graeber*

When you start your own business, you get to decide what value is. And as long as you can find enough people who agree with you, you can grow.

That’s how we small businesses change the world, without even realising it.

Imagine what we could do if we did it on purpose!

*from ‘Toward an anthropological theory of value – the false coin of our own dreams.’

November 30, 2022

Where energy goes

As humans, we spend our energy and our creativity on the things that matter to us. For you, as the boss, that’s your business. For your team? Well, they may prefer to grow perfect peppers.

So the challenge for a business owner is how to infect the people you work with (and indeed the people you seek to serve) with the same enthusiasm as you have. Because that’s the only way they’ll agree to put in anything like the same energy and creativity.

Coercion doesn’t work. Reminding them that they are dependent on you for survival doesn’t work either. Money doesn’t work that well once people have enough, and giving them less than they need or what seems fair just dampens any enthusiasm.

So what does work?

Giving them the means to achieve what they really want as human beings in work as well as outside of it:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
- Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

All the things you wanted when you set up your business then.

Make everyone a boss. Blend yourself in.