Brighton: the pioneering city in how to do business

I wrote this piece for The Argus, Brighton’s local newspaper, a few weeks back.

It’s basically the belief that I (and others) have that Brighton, by nature of its vibe, its location, its size and most of all its values, has the opportunity to play a helpful role in showing how to do business better.

We get used to drinking our own Kool-Aid in the Brighton business community. “Why, yes, we’re by the sea! Yes, we’re amazeballs at creative and digital and tourism and culture and stuff! Yes, everything is brilliant here – come and buy stuff from us! (Oh, and please tidy the beach before you leave).”

And to be fair, much of that is deserved. It is right that we are so well known for what we do: our mosaic of gorgeous North Laine boutiques, our cluster of world-class digital hothouses, our endless carnival of cultural & hedonistic experiences, and the rest.

But what would it be like if Brighton led the way in not only what its business community does but also how it did it? What if this brave, quirky city could stand up and show the world how to do business better in the 21^st century? In how to organise groups, how to motivate people, in what leadership means and how rewards are distributed? What if we can create a new form of business operating system that can spread, but always have its roots in Brighton? I think that’d be pretty cool.

So where are the local pioneers already that we can learn from and build on? Here’s a few to get us started. Mooncup is a business that has both an innovative, disruptive product AND does business differently. Mooncup’s product is an alternative to traditional feminine hygiene products. A reusable medical-grade silicon ‘cup’ design (look it up, I can’t explain it elegantly), it is massively more sustainable, and in a way just operating in this area is pretty radical – the product demands quite a mindshift from customers. And yet customers are huge advocates and most women come to Mooncup after hearing positive clamour from a close friend. But as I say, we’re already good at the ‘what’ we do in Brighton, so how do they do business differently? At Mooncup decision-making is entirely flat – at the weekly team meeting anyone can influence up and coming decisions, ‘we all pitch in’ they say. In the team wages are entirely transparent and are calculated purely based on length of service to reward loyalty and create a clear and fair system.

Down the road, Infinity Foods shows that different business can still be great Business with a capital b: rammed every day with people picking up ethically sourced dried figs and super-sensitive handcream. Whether we’re shoppers or just observers I’m pretty sure we can see that this co-operative, owned by the people working in the business, the people actually creating the value, is doing pretty damn well. What would it be like if we could extend that, and nudge up the percentage of profits made in the city that stayed in the city?

And weirdly, perhaps controversially, I would say the attempt to reorganise our beloved Brighton & Hove City Council had a whiff of the positive, radical and progressive about it. I cannot say as an outsider whether it’s working or how it has been received internally (with resistance, I imagine, given that most of us resist change) but the goal of turning a classically introspective and static bureaucracy into an outward-facing, ‘customer-centric’ organisation should be lauded. If the council can successful evolve themselves into a better shape for the 21^st century, they set the bar for the rest of us.

There are more: Big Lemon buses, Wired Sussex, Relentless Games, Robin Hood Pub, Cranks bike workshop, The Skiff co-working space, CityCamp, Moshi Moshi. And every year these ranks grow. Each organisation offers us something different to be inspired by – their purpose, their people-centric policies, the collaboration and openness at their core. This is a growing movement of businesses willing to do things differently, here, in our city.

In these examples, the change is already happening. But for every positive example there must be ten more local businesses doing things the bad old ways. A warning to those business people that believe it will be enough to be great just at what you do. It won’t. It can’t last. Just pick up a copy of the FT – old skool business is creaking, breaking, collapsing in on itself. The rules have changed. To win the best customers, the best team members, the best reputations, we must change. Change, change and change again. Not just our products, services and marketing, but our very core.

And this need for change presents our city and our organisations with a once in a lifetime opportunity: to lead the way, to get there first, and to bring the rest of the world with us. I believe we can do it.

That’s what I believe.

#cltrshck weekly ammo 2

This week’s fresh Culture Shocky linkage.

The open follower model – an older piece by grandmaster Stowe Boyd, but there’s something very interesting in this snippet, both for organisations and in the context of the social web. Picking up the organisational point, it makes me think directly about Gore, whose concept of ‘followership’ rather than leadership I write about in Culture Shock, and also other great orgs like Valve and Semco. Will the web’s model infiltrate organisations?

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The John Lewis motto should be ‘never knowingly underpay’ – piece by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian highlighting how the wonderful partnership has outsourced cleaning, so while the empowered John Lewis workers benefit from bumper bonuses cleaners get £6 an hour. Really interesting in the context of a future where less and less people are ‘on the payroll’ (given current trends). Via @jonathas

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‘Here are the things that are proven to make you happier’ – intensely link-rich post with tons of things that make us happier. The usuals – gratitude, people, giving. Via @neilperkin

But I just love the opening quote, which turns out to be from John Lennon:

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

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‘What makes work worth doing?’ – short, undemanding HBR blog, looking at how call center workers created much better results for a student scholarship programme after being briefed in person by a recipient of the organisation’s aid. Just another good reminder of the importance of meaning and purpose (both very cultureshocky).

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Two weeks away from Meaning WHOAH! So excited, so nervous, but mainly very excited. When I look at the speaker lineup I am still amazed and delighted. Can’t wait for Monday 1st October, and tickets are still being grabbed in ones and twos. I know many of you are coming along, but if you’re not, are you CRAZY?!

Ooh, and Culture Shock now has four reviews, which is ace. If you are reading the book or have finished it I’d genuinely love to hear what you thought of it!

Thanks for the links people – keep ’em coming 🙂

Platform lag

I was thinking about the different times it takes me to respond through different platforms.

Things that are important and urgent get dealt with reasonably well – they have to. But for things that aren’t important and urgent, (but are often ‘important/valuable/interesting’) it looks something like this:

Twitter – within 1 day
Facebook – within 2 days
Phone/voicemail – within 2 days
LinkedIn – within 2-3 days
Email – 1-2 weeks to never
IM – don’t use!

What does it tell us? F*** all, I expect. Other than email is the bottom of the heap. I just can’t keep up. And I don’t enjoy keeping up. Somehow I enjoy keeping up on Twitter, and LinkedIn is fine too.

Issues this throws up:

People waiting for email get pissed off when they see me idly chatting in Twitter
I feel extremely guilty about the email – that people think I think I’m better than them, but it’s not that
That the enjoyment of a given communication platform might be a point of leverage for product/service designers

How does it look for you?

#cltrshck weekly ammo

Ready for some brainfood?

I’m putting together a weekly gaggle of snippets and links that relate to Culture Shock, its mission and the interests of its writer and readers.

If you’re a one-time visitor, and want to receive these and my other blog posts, sign up yo’ email address in the top right of my blog and you’ll get mailed each post as it happens (usually 1 to 3 pieces a week).

I’m calling it ammo, cos this is motherfricking revolution 😉

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Who’s the Boss? There isn’t one. – Wall Street Journal piece on companies operating in more empowered and democratic ways. Includes Gore (in Culture Shock) and Valve (who damn well woulda been had I come across them before I wrote the book).

What I love about this piece is the expression of some of the downsides of these ways of working – things that current and past NixonMcInnes team will know well, including:

The bossless structure can be chaotic at times, he says, but “you feel like there is total trust and an element of freedom and ownership. It makes you want to do more,” says Mr. Clem, who had previously worked at a large tech firm and smaller start-ups.

Valve Economics blog – Yanis Varoufakis. For those of you who wanna dig right into Valve in depth, check out this blog by their in house economist (how cool is that?!). Thanks to Dave Boyle for sharing this.

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Culture inside and outside the corporation – Grant McCracken blog post via super-smart Antony Mayfield. What I love is the truth that when new employees join they get the freshest expression of the ‘culture’, but not the messy, layered, living reality of culture:

Good luck onboarding a new hire. A handbook may capture the most recent, the most explicit, and the most formal of the ideas and values that govern the culture, but that teeming mass of additional ideas it tends to leave out. It will take weeks, sometimes months for the new hire to glimpse all the ideas at work in the corporate culture and the rules that govern when and by whom they’re used. Time wasted. Value squandered. And sometimes a lost hire.

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Commons: Alternatives to Markets and States. Piece by Derek Wall in Energy Bulletin. No idea how I came across this one – sorry, sharer of good content! And I haven’t read it beyond the fifth paragraph. BUT. Dan McQuillan, a guy who has consistently blown my mind with cerebral ideas over the last 6 or so years, did a great talk at Social Business Sessions about the Commons. And I know, just know, that there’s something huge in here, something so important that I’m not even ready to peek at it yet. So if you’re ready, start reading 🙂

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37signals Earns Millions Each Year. Its CEO’s Model? His Cleaning Lady – Fast Company magazine. Yep, so we’ve all read glowing 37Signals articles and books before, right. But when you read what Jason is saying here, and think about their 35 employees and huge impact, revenues and profits, their sustained journey, and contrast with the ‘sickness’ he talks about that’s represented in TechCrunch, he’s really really REALLY onto something:

I won’t name names. I used to name names. But I think all you have to do is read TechCrunch. Look at what the top stories are, and they’re all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don’t matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you’ll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business. TechCrunch to me is the great place to look to see the sickness in our industry right now.

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For me, all of these are so #cltrshck it hurts. I am genuinely uplifted by this rising tide of related ideas about how to make things better, seeing these practices gaining profile and momentum.

Let me know if you have any feedback on this format. And please keep sharing them links.

Modern slaves

After writing Culture Shock I went on a bit into a bit of a sofa-slouching-brain-resting phase: bought a PS3, developed a bad habit around Battlefield 3, and stopped reading business books.

I’m sort of still half in that phase. Still can’t get my head back into business books, for example.

Good things came of this slovenly phase. I learned a lot from getting back into video games and ended up writing this piece for Wired UK: ‘Modern business is a video game: a bad one’.

I’ve also been bingeing on the Game of Thrones books. Basically ‘fantasy’ Lord of the Rings-esque series, describing the rise and fall of elite families and their characters in a mythical world. Brilliant, easy reading for a geek like me.

(Sorry for the long intro here – I’m winding up to something interesting, I think…)

All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve been spending an hour or so a night in bed immersed in stories of a feudal world, with the hierarchies of old – from Kings and Queens down to filthy poor peasants and slaves.

At the same time, consolidation in the social media and social business sectors has continued. Many of our peers have now sold their businesses to bigger companies, all part of that natural ecosystem of business, where the entrepreneurs reach the end of their natural phase, want to move on to the next thing, and where incumbents want to buy in some of the sizzly new stuff. That’s all good: I’ve been really happy seeing people I like achieve their goals and more and more I can see the sense in this cycle.

In my head these two things have begun to relate: the fortunes of the Lords and Ladies of a fictional world and the accomplishments of entrepreneurs in my world.

And for some reason I’ve started to get this idea that most people are modern slaves, at work. Or at least, disempowered and mistreated peasants. (I know many people aren’t, but this is a dramatisation, mkay!?).

If we pretend that most people are ‘modern slaves’ at work, toiling away to produce the lion’s share of rewards for a small royal elite (shareholders and senior management), when it is in fact their work that creates the rewards, then I can’t stop thinking about employee ownership as the only way forward.

In fact, I’ll go further: I believe that within 15 years, all businesses will have a significant proportion of employee ownership (let’s say more than 25%). That’s probably wrong – if it were to happen, would probably be the greatest shift of wealth ever in the history of the world or something. But it’s just what I feel intuitively – no science included.

Entrepreneurs deserve a premium for taking risk and the act of creation and early growth. I feel that strongly, personally. And shareholders deserve a reward for their risk and investment. But it feels too much, too far skewed at the moment, to me.

I am conscious that this creates a dangerous expectation for me as an entrepreneur. Personally, despite what I’m saying I would like to do a traditional ‘exit’ at some point. I think it would be interesting, exciting, and a nice lump sum would be useful too. As for NixonMcInnes (where I don’t think that’s likely), I personally think that increasing the employee ownership from 5 of us (25%) to 90%-100% would be a brilliant outcome. So what I am saying isn’t free from hypocrisy, expectation-setting or whatever: I’m talking the talk – it remains to be seen if I (and others) can walk it.

But yes. There it is. When the millions go to the few founders and executives, and the rest of the organisation usually resembles a pyramid, with most people earning not very much at all, have we really come very far in the past thousand years? Outliers like John Lewis and other-brilliant-companies-owned-by-their-staff are just that – outliers, quirks. Isn’t that a bit weird?

Aren’t most people just modern slaves, when they are toiling for others?

And won’t that necessarily change as things are becoming more transparent, people are better connected, work tools are lower cost and more accessible, and more of us in the UK work in knowledge work where the product is the people?

I think so. That’s why this topic is in my book, and why we have Margaret Elliott speaking at Meaning 2012 about her experiences creating and scaling up successful employee-owned businesses here in the UK.

But now I believe in this even more – more than when I wrote Culture Shock, more than when I curated the original speakers for Meaning. Ownership belongs here, where it happens, not somewhere else – best of all, in the hands of the people doing it. In time, this will be irresistable.

What do you think?

Other voices from the tidal wave

If you are interested in the things I write about in Culture Shock and we are curating around Meaning 2012, you should pay attention to these three voices too:

Tom Nixon’s blog – ‘Using democratic business & employee ownership to reinvent capitalism and make the world a happier and sustainable place’

Tom is the co-founder of NixonMcInnes, my original business partner and a great great guy. He is currently writing up a storm as he travels the world, kicking about issues around the reinvention of capitalism, employee ownership, and other good stuff.

Must read.

Alan Moore – SMLXL

I am about a fifth of the way through Alan’s new book ‘No Straight Lines’ and I read that first chunk thinking ‘man, we are so on the same wavelength’. Alan’s style is different to mine – there’s a whole load more evidence, tons of references, and a different tone, but the story he is telling is the same I think. That is, things have to change fundamentally and disruptively.

Following Alan’s ongoing blog writings seems to be a clever thing to do, and grab the book too if you haven’t already.

Conscious Business UK – ‘Business, but different’

Conscious Business UK is a blog where a collective of likeminded people share ideas about the evolution of business. At the core of that collective are a few very smart people including Pete Burden and Lasy Lawless, who are both also directors and owners of NixonMcInnes (this isn’t a backslapping fest, honest), but in their spare time they wear other hats, growing a consultancy called SeeStep which seeks to develop ‘conscious business’.

The different perspectives on this blog work really well, and I particularly liked this post by Lasy on ‘Evidence for Conscious Business’ which is packed with credible research to back up these ideas we are all promoting.

Add these three further voices to your regular reading if you are as interested in this tidal wave of change we are seeing. This thing is big, and growing.

Culture Shock is out – get ’em hot

Hello friends,

THE TIME IS NIGH! The book is out – see photographic evidence of a Culture Shock out in the wild on someone else’s desk.

Get yer copy, and please review it in Amazon and share your thoughts with me.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW. <— I used to work in marketing.

For me personally it’s a weird old feeling, seeing a book come out with your name on it. I’ve moved from excitement and fatigue, post-completion, to antipathy and mild warmth in the quiet middle bit, to now a state of excitement and anxiety now that it’s no longer a game but a reality. Terrified of negative reactions, hopeful of new doors opening and a deluge of new connections with people that believe in the same things. Expect most first-time authors have felt something similar.

I know my publishers at Wiley (hi Jonathan and Megan!) feel we have lots to do on the promotion front, so I’m conscious of the mountain we need to climb there, and also of not spamming you guys in my immediate network too much. But you early believers and friends are the crucial first wave!

Thank you again for the help and support many of you gave along the way.

Got a nice bottle of wine to celebrate tonight with the Mrs.

With love 🙂

Will

Join us at Meaning 2012, an event on the future of business

With my clever co-conspirators at NixonMcInnes, I’ve been helping to organise Meaning 2012, an event about the future of business.

It is HUGELY exciting.

There are future tech conferences, events about employee ownership, about happiness, and lots more. But no one event – we felt – pulled all of the related strands that make up the progressive future business we want to see in the world. So we decided to put one on ourselves.

Our speakers are the very best in their fields, drawn from an international pool and are going to blow our minds.

So far we have:

•   Umair Haque, the mighty rogue economist and leading management thinker
•   Caroline Lucas, MP and Leader of the Green Party
•   Stowe Boyd, wise author and social tools researcher
•   Alexander Kjerulf, brilliant happiness-at-work expert
•   Vinay Gupta, inventor of the hexayurt and clear-eyed critic of the status quo
•   Margaret Elliott, employee ownership advocate and inspirational do-er
•   David Hieatt, founder of Howies, The Do Lectures and now Hiut Denim
•   Professor Karen Pine, infectiously upbeat and challenging behaviour change expert

And participants are signing up from all over the place.

If you’re interested in progressive business, in the topics I cover in my book Culture Shock (out this coming month!) and all that other good ‘let’s change this’ stuff, join us at Meaning 2012. It is going to rock.

Open salaries on ‘Show Me Your Money’, Channel 4

If you follow this blog, I reckon you’re interested in progressive business practices.

You NEED to watch ‘Show Me Your Money’ from Channel 4 tomorrow evening.

It’s a documentary about a company experimenting with open salaries, something we’ve done at NixonMcInnes since our inception some 10 or 11 years ago. And something I write about and promote in the Fair Finances (chapter 8) of Culture Shock.

But whilst it feels right, and better, it’s not easy – in fact, it’s gotten harder for us as the years have progressed, so it’ll be fascinating to see how these guys (a plumbing firm, I believe) get on.

So very, very Culture Shock and Meaning Conference eh!

Do let us know what you think… be great to hear reactions 🙂

(More exciting is seeing this movement grow, seeing the swell gradually build up into a rolling wave. This is the future of business. THIS IS IT, PEOPLE).

Designing for the psychopath

A while ago I went to hear Jon Ronson talk about his new book on The Pyschopath Test. As you’d expect if you know Ronson, the talk was both droll and fascinating. But there was that thing, again, about how many leaders may be psychopathic.

Then, in this last week or so, with more outrageous behaviour at banks here in the UK and the attitude of some of their leaders it led to a discussion – probably with Jenni – about what to do with psychopaths. And, in this pop science pub conversation, we were considering non-murdering psychopaths – those that get on and progress especially in business due to their personalities and traits, (though I admit I have no idea what I’m talking about) but don’t kill people (directly).

The question is, as society evolves is there a role for psychopathic people in life and business? What can they offer to the common good? How can they contribute? It would be easy to assume that we want a world only populated with compassionate, empathic, considerate people – that does sound quite nice, actually. But is it true?

Or to put it in the words of software developers, are psychopaths a feature or a bug in society? They seem only to be discussed as a bug, an issue that needs to be fixed.

In this pub conversation we agreed that it is easy to bemoan people who appear to have no regard for others, and the kind of audacious, utterly cold and ruthless decisions that these kind of CEOs and political leaders make. But is it possible that we need them more than we realise? I’m willing to entertain that idea.

And in the future, from the perspective of inclusion and also from using the resources we have to get the best outcomes for as many people as possible, why would we segregate people with these traits and condition any more than anyone else?

If we were designing a better world, wouldn’t an enlightened future world actually place these people in roles that suited their unique talents and abilities, and provide counterbalances and stopping mechanisms to optimise their positive contributions, whilst limiting the awful consequences of unhindered decision-making?