Employees are Always a Bad Idea.

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Children or Adults

This Industrial Age concept was never a good idea for companies, and was worse for the “employees”. Today, companies that move forward without employees will thrive. Those that don’t will fall behind.

The Industrial Age gave us cool toys and a cushy life, but it also came with some Business Diseases. One of the most rabid of the Business Diseases is the concept of an employee, which is a very new idea in the history of man, and one that needs to go away.

When machines took over most production, they couldn’t run themselves, and so the Industrial Age re-created people in the image of machines in order to run them.

“Employees are “Silent”
Over time companies made it clear they only wanted the productive part of the person to show up. They required people to leave the human being (the messy part) at home. As a result, the generation which entered the work force at the very peak of the Industrial Age (1945-1960-ish) was given the worst generational label ever – The Silent Generation. If you had a “Silent” as a parent, you learned to live life the way they had been taught – “Be loyal to the company. Do what you’re told. Show up early, leave late. Shut up, sit down, don’t make waves, live invisibly, go out quietly. The company will take care of you.”

Employees are Children
This view of work (and life) turned adults back into children. You were taught that the most mature person was one who obediently took orders, did what they were told, didn’t question authority, was blindly loyal to those in charge, and lived passively as others directed their lives. Pretty much what we want a four year old to do.

In order to keep the children from ruining the house, and to make them extensions of machines, the Industrial Age boxed people in with extremely clear and narrow limitations on what they could do, the hours in which they could do them, and endless limitations on being human and “adult” at work. It stripped them of their need to think, create and solve because the machine didn’t need them to think, create and solve. It just needed them to do.

Employees Are a Disease, not a Cure
We reject the business culture of the Industrial Age as a bad idea that needs to be corrected. Employees are one of those Business Diseases that should be eradicated. Because of the Industrial Age, the word “employee” has become synonymous with “child”. We can’t even use the word anymore. We don’t want to hire children who need to be told what to do and managed closely so they don’t run into the street.

Employees are Replaced by Stakeholders
So we don’t hire employees, but have replaced them with Stakeholders. Our Stakeholders are sold out to living well by doing good, and are not employees who punch clocks. Stakeholders are first and foremost adults who can think, take initiative and make decisions, carry responsibility, take ownership, be creative and solve problems.

Stakeholders are Adults
Our Stakeholders are all adults. “Employee” is a four-letter word for us. Adults don’t need someone to keep them from running into the streets or ruining the carpets. Adults ask questions. They don’t live passively but are self-directed, creative, and solve problems. They don’t shut up; they make waves, they are highly visible and they don’t expect the company or other adults to take care of them. Adults own stuff, and they own their work as a natural part of being an adult. And the whole messy person comes to work, not just the extension of the machine.

Stakeholders Require Leadership, not Adult Supervision
If you hire Stakeholders (adults) instead of employees (children), it changes the way you direct people. We don’t have office hours, vacation time or personal days. We’re not interested in whose car was in the parking lot first or who left last. We believe office politics is a waste of time, so no one will ever be promoted.

Stakeholders Focus on Work, not Promotion to the Next Title
Every adult who works with us (over 20 full and part-time and growing) has a title that includes the word Chief; Chief Results Officer, Chief Connecting Officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Development Officer, Chief of MIH (Making it Happen).

We don’t have supervisors or managers or directors or VPs – just Chiefs. None of us will ever need to be promoted, we’re already all at the top. We’ll just grow into more responsibilities as we become better at things. As we do them, they will be recognized and somebody might change our title (there is no centralized title giver).

Stakeholders Create Better Teams
We believe in working together as Committed Community (adults live in community) to get results for each other and for other business owners. Every full-time Stakeholder will take part in profit-sharing. Why wouldn’t they? They’re all adults who own their work, they should own profits from their work as well. That’s what adults do.

Stakeholders are Self-Motivated
Although we lease 1,500sf of office space for training and rent other spaces around the city, none of us have an office there – we all work from our homes and places like breakfast joints and coffee shops. If it helps somebody to get things done better, we’ll get them an office.

Stakeholders Make You and Themselves More Money
Our business grew 61% in 2010, 41% in 2011, 75% in 2012 and projected at 50% in 2013. Why? Because every Stakeholder is an adult, taking responsibility, creating, problem solving, making it happen, and taking ownership of whatever needs to be done to bring our clients the best experience and the most tangible results possible. And everyone is a lot happier because they all work with adults who pull their own weight.

Employees are a bad idea. Stakeholders rock.

Lewis & Clark – Your Best Business Heros

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Maps are over rated.

Don’t look at IBM, Starbucks or Facebook to see how to start and grow a business successfully. The adventures of pioneers Lewis & Clark 208 years ago are the prototype for all of us. Things don’t often work out as we planned. Most often what happens instead is the good stuff.

In May of 1804, Lewis & Clark were given the mission by President Jefferson of finding a water passage from St. Louis to the Pacific ocean. How they approached fulfilling that mission is one of the best business start up examples in history.

Lewis and Clark were masters at planning as you go – what we call the 2.1 Planning Process. They only knew 2.1 things:
1) Where are we? – St. Charles (St. Louis)
2) Where do we want to end up? (the Pacific ocean)
2.1) What are the next few steps? (get a boat, hire a crew, leave)

Just the next few steps
You never get all of step “3)”, which is HOW to get all the way from step 1) to step 2). You only get “2.1)”. Traditional business planning teaches us that HOW you get all the way from 1) to 2) should be planned before you leave. But it’s voodoo, nonsense and fortune telling.

Just like Lewis & Clark, we never get all of step three, and you definitely don’t get it before you leave the dock. All we get is 2.1 – the next few steps.

On the third day of the trip, Lewis and Clark’s main vessel nearly capsized which would have ended the trip. Their experience even on waters others had traveled before was vastly different. Sound familiar? The other guy’s business experience won’t be yours – don’t let him tell you how it should go.

Lewis & Clark planned for the first few miles and could only guess at what they needed to take with them beyond that. All they could do is plan the next few steps and get moving.

Movement beats planning
They took off with 38 men and three boats but could have easily taken 1,000 men and 100 boats. Looking back from the future, we know this wouldn’t have helped them, and all that over-planning would have in fact made it even harder to move quickly, support such a large contingency and survive the winters.

This is where we miss it big time – over-planning before we even get moving. Lewis & Clark only figured out what they needed as each new obstacle presented itself. After planning as best they could for the first few steps, they simply had to be willing to make constant and quick adjustments or they would have perished. Every business has to have the same willingness to get moving and take soundings as you go.

Long-range planning doesn’t work
If you read the adventures of Lewis & Clark it reads like everything from a sappy novel to a National Lampoon comedy to an Indiana Jones movie. No business plan would have uncovered 1/100th of what actually happened.

They thought it would take 12 months, but 2 1/2 years later they stumbled back into St. Louis where people had long since written them off as dead. They thought they would float in big boats all the way to the Pacific but ended up in wagons, then canoes, on horses, walking, back in canoes, back on horses and wagons, all the while hoping they would find locals who they could trade with to get these things. They were making the whole thing up as they went along.

On they way back, only one month from the safety of St. Louis, Lewis was shot in the touche by the near-sighted, blind-in-one-eye Private Cruzatte who thought he was an elk. You just can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t plan for it either.

Pursue the first thing to find the real thing
Businesses almost always find what they will succeed at by failing at their first objective. Lewis & Clark had one main objective, find a navigable passage from the midwest to the Pacific Ocean, connecting the Mississippi to western oceanic trade. They utterly failed in their main objective. Yet pursuing that objective led them to multiple huge successes; mapping thousands of miles of land, treaties with Indians, identifying and naming hundreds of plant and animal species and opening up a whole new land for exploration. They gave courage to a whole generation who would follow in their steps, and rough maps to begin the journey.

And as with any business, those who followed the same route as Lewis & Clark had entirely different adventures. No two businesses can follow the same plan, even in the same industry.

Move the boat, then make the map
But the best correlation between Lewis & Clark’s adventure and your business is the answer to this question:

When did they get their maps?

The answer? When they got back.

Take the first step, then do it again and again
The best way for you to know how your business will unfold is to know exactly where you want to go, leave the dock and get moving, be flexible and adaptable, make it up as you go along, and grab the opportunities as they unfold. The thing you thought would be your main business will almost certainly grow into something you could have never seen from the dock.

Don’t know what to do to get all the way from here to there? Figure out what the next step is, even if it is a guess, and do it. Then do it again and again. Always know exactly where you want to end up, and take a thousand first steps to get there.

We usually find the good stuff by wading through the muck we thought was the good stuff. A map would take all the fun out of it. You’ll get your maps when you’re done.