Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 67 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 13, 2021

Philanthropy

It probably feels great to show your love for humanity by giving away your fortune once you’ve made it.

What if you showed your love for humanity in the way you make it in the first place?

Then there’d be no need.

August 12, 2021

Sharing

I’m one of seven children. A lot of work for my mother, who was nominally ‘The Boss’ in our house.

She didn’t like it though.

She resented being the parent who had to get us to do homework, or tidy our rooms, or do the washing up. She resented being the one who shouted and told us off. She resented the fact that her contribution was taken for granted, invisible, unappreciated. Most of all she resented being the one who had to think of everything, for everyone else.

Fortunately for my mum, and as I realised later, for us, she went on strike when she was in her mid 40’s.

From that point on, if we were 16 or over, we took responsibility for ourselves. If we wanted washing done, we did it ourselves. If we wanted clothes ironed, we did it ourselves. If we didn’t like ironing, then we could choose clothes that didn’t need ironing. If we didn’t like tidying our bedrooms, we could live in a mess. If we wanted a different meal from everyone else, we could, as long as we planned and cooked it and washed up ourselves.

It was hard for my mum, because it meant we did quite often live in a mess, but it showed me at least that beyond a certain age, a family, like a small business is a collaborative affair. And that this collaboration works best when its the responsibility that’s shared, not just the work.

Being ‘The Boss’ isn’t as nearly as much fun as people think.

The solution is to make everyone the boss of themselves, within a framework of shared purpose. Everyone is better for it. Especially the business.

August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do. Often they also tell you how to do it. A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’. And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how. It’s uncomfortable. It feels wrong. Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family. You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable. If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss. Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too. So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

August 10, 2021

Stereotypes

The other day I had an experience I’d not had for 40 years – of being followed around a shop by a security guard, convinced I’m trying to steal something.

I wasn’t shoplifting, but clearly I looked like I might be a shoplifter because of what I was wearing. 40 years ago punk/goth, the other day an anarchist face mask.

It amused me, because real shoplifters aren’t trying to stand out. They look like everyone else. That’s how they get away with it.

But we love our stereotypes, and can’t resist them.

We really should beware of them.

August 9, 2021

Less is more

Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars? Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices. And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?

As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.

In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam. Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.

More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from. But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.

The lesson for packaging your Promise?

If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice. If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard. They’ll probably give up.

August 6, 2021

500 percent

I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.

It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.

Here’s my takeaway from reading it:

Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:

They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.” In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework. In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards. Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so. In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.

As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading. In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.

If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.

And I’d love to help.

August 5, 2021

Handovers

When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead. Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them. Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money. You’ve introduced transaction costs. At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give. So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it. That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond. It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun. What’s not to like?

August 4, 2021

Sunflower moments

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.

His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself.” D.H. Lawrence.

That ‘third thing’, the ‘vivid relation’ between ‘me’ and the other, is a moment when we feel truly alive, connected, aware of our place in the universe. Such moments don’t only happen to artists. I’ve experienced them while shopping, walking or making dinner. The difference is I’ve never tried to capture them.

It seems to me that much of what we do as humans is about creating opportunities where those ‘sunflower moments’ – that you might also call Sawubona can happen.

What if that is what work was really for?

What if we measured our performance by that?

August 3, 2021

Resisting Commodification

What do we mean when we call something ‘a commodity’?

It means its substitutable, interchangeable, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

It means we don’t have to think about it. It’s just there. To hand when we need it, otherwise invisible.

I no longer use ‘commodity olive oil’. Mine comes from Marije in Portugal. I’ve seen her family harvesting the olives. I’ve seen the designs for the special ceramic bottles it can come in. I’ve seen the ship ‘Gallant’ sailing to pick her oil up, and sailing back to Penzance to drop it off. I know the names of many of the people involved in making that happen.

And every time I use my oil, which is every day, I think of them and all the work that’s gone into getting olive oil to my table. I feel connected to a network.

My olive oil is not a commodity, I pay well above average price for it, and it’s worth every penny.

Commodification is not inevitable. We can choose to be different, as buyers, producers and middle-men.

As a community.