Business Is Easy Too
By Lynn Rasmussen in Business, Lifestyle Design, Systems Thinking | Comments (2)
These are the notes from a teleconference with the Coachinc business coaching SIG (open to the public) run by Denise Kirk-Murray. I was the guest speaker last Thursday. If you were on the call, please comment on it, pro and con! Here we go:
I grew up in retail grocery stores, I started a small business in my twenties, and I now sit on the boards of two startups and three nonprofits. I know that business is not easy. But I also know people for whom business is easy. It seems to come naturally for these people.
I am going to present a few ways of thinking that make business easy. They are:
1. Communication is not the key.
2. Don’t work at it.
3. Embrace chaos.
1. Communication is not the key:
Low moods = Circular, repetitive, negative thinking; narrow perspective; communication of poor quality thinking
Higher moods = clear, creative thinking; broad perspective; great communication
Fear, anger, and stress are signals to step back and assess what’s going on. As the essential process in meditation, prayer, martial arts, and professionalism, “stepping back” from low moods and busy thinking is a way of being and a practice.
More important than the content of thinking is the quality of thinking.
Key to great communication is: Raise the mood to open up and clear thinking and to increase optimism and possibility.
2. Don’t work at it.
Play at it. Toss ideas around. Design rather than manage.
Tradition has evaporated. We are reinventing how to eat, exercise, partner, parent, work, spend, worship, contribute, everything. We need to be able to design our lives on the run, in the moment, consciously. That is what coaching is all about: Designing systems into our lives that make life and business easy.
Very small, simple actions can make a big difference, and attempts at big, complex problem-solving may not make any real difference at all.
Look at the tolerations list. Focus on the small things, design life to get it done, and what happens? A whole life opens up.
I asked Pete Syracusa, a businessman who has started some of the most innovative successful restaurant franchises, what his secret was. He said to start from the bottom and work up, creating the simplest systems, checklists of the most basic tasks and arrangements. Then move up through the system. Always get the input of the people doing the job. Maybe they have a better way. This is a creative project. He’s very excited by it. Why have one restaurant when you can have 100? It’s easier to have 100 stores with a system in place than it is to have one store with inadequate systems.
3. Embrace chaos.
We see that sometimes things can be very chaotic: new projects that haven’t quite jelled, the chaos of someone’s thinking when needs are unmet, the complicated mess of a business. As coaches we wonder, “Where to start?â€
Start where the client is. It will be all right.
In machine thinking, chaos leads to death. In nature, chaos is what happens in the creative process just before the emergence of something new. Chaos is found throughout nature in all complex systems.
So expect chaos. It never feels comfortable but relax around it. Remember that the key is the feeling. Open up to chaos. It’s a good thing.
It may seem right to close down but that’s not the right thing to do. The right thing to do is to bring in even more information. Then sleep on it, rest a bit, let your mind process it, and chances are pretty good that it will shake down.
In class I said that I find that no matter where a client starts, and I don’t plan it, the first or second coaching session involves tolerations. One of you in the class asked how I thought that happened. I couldn’t answer but she could. It comes from an understanding and a focus on the power of the small to make very big differences. I think that she is right.
So to sum it up:
- Communication is not the key. The key is the feeling. Raise the mood/feeling and thinking clears. Communication flows. Common sense and a natural wisdom reigns.
- Don’t work at it. Continually play at it. Design business systems. Don’t manage people. Design with them.
- Expect and embrace chaos. It indicates growth, not death. It’s a natural part of the creative design process.
10 things to remember to make business easy (from the participants):
- Focus on small things.
- Step back from struggle.
- Embrace chaos.
- Raise the mood to increase results.
- Listen to others—Listen to yourself.
- Feel first, then reason. Check in.
- Business can be easy vs. difficult.
- Reinventing as a lifestyle
- Design the simple from the ground up.
- We have the tools we need from Corporate Coach U/Coach U.
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Lynn, I found it interesting that you cited a history in retail grocery stores. I had a childhood in a family restaurant — a Chinese restaurant, if anyone could be more cliche — and then teen years in my father’s retail appliance and furniture store.
In working with corporate people, I’ve discovered that many are pretty far removed from the immediacies of small business. I had one person exclaim that he couldn’t figure out how “mom and pop” stores survive, and I said that I couldn’t figure out how corporate stores survive. In a “mom and pop” store, the owner can see the inventory in the shelf or stockroom, and immediately deals with personnel issues on a face-to-face basis. Sure, corporate retail stores get lots of volume, but have huge overhead.
I’ve been guiding an master’s degree in international service business management at http://rendez.org/en/curriculum , and have suggested that these students should talk to restaurant managers to understand how quickly someone can go out of business, and/or hotel managers to really understand what customer service is all about.
From a systems perspective, there’s big issues in scaling businesses up in size. Somehow, there’s organizations caught in the middle — too big to be small and small to be big — that need to make the conscious decision to move one way or the other.
We used get takeouts at a favorite family-run Chinese restaurant once a week when I was little. Dad and the owner used to drink a beer together while we waited for the food. My father used to say that a business has to either stay small or go big, but he was speaking of the days when Ford and General Motors seemed to have the monopoly on cars.
I often refer clients and friends to Gerber’s EMyth Revisited. He describes the 10 or so systems that every business requires to succeed, whether the mom and pop store or IBM. A vision, a reason for being, an accounting system, an employee management system, a client management system, a sales system, etc.
Business (or marriage, community, or any human system) is stronger when the people involved have a clear image of the system as a whole in terms of governance/decision-making, economics, social action, education/learning, health and well-being, technology, esthetics, and ethics–Bela Banathy Sr.’s guidance system. I find that in any well-run business employees can tell me what the owner/employer stands for in each of these areas. If one of these areas is poorly conceptualized, the system flounders.
When the guidance systems are not in place and everyone has to be continually catching up, any scale of business is too much.
Growing up in family business was invaluable. I have a gut-level feel for business that can’t be learned in school. What a gift that is!