‘The E-Myth Revisited’ suggests creating an organisational chart when a business starts with a view to how it will look when it is mature.  By necessity at this early stage it has the owners’ names beside every role.  This needs to change over time.

The key here is to start at the bottom of the organisation not the top - starting to work on the business at the flash points where one is working in the business.  We have recently been considering appointing a general manager, essentially to be one of us - so where there were 2 people running the business now there would be three!  But when thinking more about the tasks that are consuming time and where we are adding little strategic value it became clear that these were primarily administrivia….financial tasks, resourcing tasks, quoting tasks…not general manager tasks.

And, in fact, how could we delegate the strategic management of the business when we didn’t yet have the operational or tactical management of the business under control?

So, the focus now is on the identification, process and delegation of these tasks not on recruiting a general manager, although recruitment of some sort may be required.

In Michael Gerber’s classic business book “The E-Myth Revisited” he discusses why small businesses don’t work - suggesting that when a person starts a business they are a combination of three people: the Entrepreneur, the Manager and the Technician. 

Gerber asserts strongly that being a Technician is not sufficient.  If a person really wants to do the technical work in their business then they should close the business down and go and work for someone else.  By focusing on the technical work often the managerial and entrepreneurial work gets crowded out and the business owner has created a job for themselves but not a business.  Except that now, as well as doing their job, they have to do the accounting, the HR, the marketing etc….it’s no wonder they’re so tired at the end of the day!

So, this has led me to ask the question: what aspects of being a Technician can I let go of to allow the space for the Entrepreneur and the Manager to grow?

Sitting on my ‘to do’ list is a challenging report that I have to write…

A couple of weeks ago I put it in a mental ‘parking space’ knowing that I had the grace of the Christmas break to rest on.

At the beach last week I was just thinking…and there it was - the structure, the key themes, the gotchas….When I got home I wrote it all up on my whiteboard and played around a bit with some of the ideas.  Whew!  That’s the ‘difficult’ part - the part that gets rewarded.  Next comes the mechanics of writing.

This reminds me how ‘white space’ in our lives is important in allowing us to be creative.

This has been a long time between posts partly because, as well as the usual work, I delivered three papers in 6 weeks all on different topics:

1.  Tales from the information management frontlines

2. Email management

3. EDRMS and Knowledge Management

Two were delivered in Christchurch and the other was delivered in Taupo.  Oddly enough, at all three I had different representatives of the same organisation, all grappling with their document management implementation.  They sounded completely enmeshed in the taxonomy workshop process so beloved of information management practitioners….while at the same time having some teams up and running already in various states of disarray.  There was a universal sense of frustration and cynicism about whether this ‘go around’ would work this time.

The challenge for this organisation appears to be one of both demonstrating and delivering value.  In a larger organisation (by NZ terms) this gets harder to do as the ‘greater good’ is not believed by anyone.  I think they’re going to continue pouring time, money and staff motivation into an effort that will get more and more bogged down.

So, what to do?  Set the core Information Management design structures and allow flexibility within these. This is a diverse organisation and an implementation needs to recognise this rather than define its taxonomy and metadata down to the nth degree straightjacketing people into ways of working that don’t suit them.   Focus on key process or information issues that are currently hurting and fix these.  All documents are not equal and yet most EDRMS implementations try to spread the net wide enough to catch all of them on Day 1.  In this approach the net is too wide and both the big fish (that we care about) and the lesser fish (that are still records but matter less long term) slip through the gaps or else we catch lots of tiddlers while the real prizes swim away unscathed.