Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 57 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

January 26, 2022

Dream Teams

I’ve been reading the Netflix employee handbook – or at least versions of it that are used as exampes online. It’s pretty well summarised on their jobs page.

There’s a lot I love.

The idea that responsibility comes with freedom:

“Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals”
“We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference.”
“In general, freedom and rapid recovery is better than trying to prevent error.”
“Some processes are about increased productivity, rather than error avoidance, and we like processes that help us get more done.”

Or that in a dream team, the team comes first:

“On a dream team, there are no “brilliant jerks.” The cost to teamwork is just too high.”

Or that managment is about creating context, rather than controlling:

“We pride ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior management makes.”

Or that by being highly aligned at the top enables loose coupling lower down:

“We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals.”

So what is it I’m finding uncomfortable?

I think it might be this:

“Mostly for our salaried employees; there are many limitations on this for our hourly employees due to legal requirements.“

and this:

” Sustained “B” performance, despite an “A” for effort, gets a respectful severance package.”

Why does this make me uncomfortable?

Because the “Dream Team” can’t function without the people who work behind the scenes.

Mainly because the threat of expulsion at the whim of your boss feels like the worst kind of control to me.

January 25, 2022

Our best selves

Being ‘all of yourself, to everyone, all of the time‘ is what we might call being our ‘best selves’, our ‘whole selves’.

If you want your people to bring that ‘whole self’ to work, you have to make sure the work feeds it properly:

logical and creative,
thinking and feeling,
independent and communal,
autonomous and collaborative,
leading and following,
familiar and innovative,
left brain and right brain,
etcetera,
etcetera,

If you only use half the person, you’ll only get half the job.

In other words, the work needs to empower them to be fully human.

The investment pays off. Handsomely.

January 24, 2022

Leaders

I loved this image from Seth Godin’s blog post today: It reminds me of one of my favourite diagrams: We … Read More “Leaders”

January 21, 2022

Slow reading

I read a lot, and I read fast. But sometimes it’s nice to ‘slow down’, by reading something longer – a sequence of books that encompass individual stories as part of a larger whole.

It could be non-fiction, like Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of’ series, or crime fiction such as the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, or Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe novels. Or it could even be children’s fiction, like Harry Potter or this series from Susan Cooper.

Whatever it is, there’s something very satisfying about working through individual books, adding to the bigger picture as you go, seeing the main characters grow, enjoying the references back to earlier stories or characters, or seeing the same story told from a different perspective, or simply noticing how the author’s writing style develops. It feels more rounded, more rich, more true to life than a simple jog from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’.

Perhaps I enjoy them because in these works the authors create an entire tapestry, not just a single thread. An ecosystem, rather than a single process. An ecosystem that can generate many different stories, not just the ones that happen to have been told.

There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple tale, or with building an ecosystem. You just need to know which one you’re aiming for.

Much like a business then.

January 20, 2022

Democracy

For the ancient Athenians, elections were profoundly unsatisfactory. The idea of devolving responsibility for running Athenian life to a few people simply because they could afford to do it full time was, for them, disturbing, and likely to lead to demagoguery, factionalism, and ultimately tyranny.

So for most public offices their preferred method of selection was sortition – a random selection from a pool of eligible citizens, much like our modern jury service. Posts were held temporarily and short term, so that during his life a free Athenian could expect to serve many times in several different capacities, part of a group of people performing the same office.

Of course to our eyes, the system was far from perfect. Only free men were in the pool of eligibility, but within that pool, it didn’t matter who you were; what you did, how well you were educated, or how much you owned. If you were a free Athenian man, you could be picked and you took your turn at making Athens run smoothly.

And it meant that every free Athenian man had to be able to carry out these duties if called upon. They had to learn how things worked, as part of their education, and by participating as observers as well as actors.

It took a lot of effort to run things this way (effort freed up by slaves), but it seems to have been effective at making a life well lived (eudaimonia) possible for everyone involved.

Nowadays we’d use technology to free up people’s time and call it participatory democracy, or holacracy, or Teal, or self-management.

The Athenians just called it democracy.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control. They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well. They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it. They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it. Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself. But after a while, your people won’t even need that. With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.