Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
(Designing for both recurrence and emergence)
In his seminal book, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dives right into the challenge that bedevils most entrepreneurs: how to have your business work for you, instead of you working for — or being a slave to — your business. The core of his approach: systematically design it so it can run without you. His sterling example: a MacDonald’s franchise, which can consistently produce french fries that are never more than seven minutes olds anywhere in the world with staff of high school students with 200% per year staff turnover.
When I introduced this provocation to the staff of my media company many years ago, people bristled: “We’re not french fries! This has no relevance for us.”
Now people aren’t potatoes (well, hopefully yours aren’t), but there is a lot of recurrence in your business — and even in many if not most creative endeavors. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to distinguish the aspects of your business that can (and must) produce reliable recurrence and the aspects that depend on listening for and opening new possibilities. Between which aspects are procedural, and which depend on allowing — enabling — your people to listen, innovate, and figure out the “how.”
And how the first can support the second. Recurrence and emergence. (For you personally, as well as for your business.)
#businessandmanagement #recurrenceandemergence
