Back to Insights

A series in eight chapters

The Long Answer

Eight chapters on how a business ends up owning the part of its software that matters, in the order the work actually happens. Read it end to end, or take the one that describes your week.

Why it is in this order

Most writing about software starts with what to buy. This starts where the work starts, which is somewhere much smaller: taking one thing somebody already does by hand and having the software do it instead. No new system, nothing switched off, nothing for anyone to learn.

What follows is the order the rest of it actually happens in. The symptom an owner feels, the cause underneath it, what looking properly finds, the decision that comes out of that, and what it is all for. It ends where the work ends, which is a business's own customers noticing something without being able to say what.

1 Where it starts | 7 min read Automate the Carrying, Never the Caring Most businesses automate the part the customer touches, because that is where the cost is easiest to see. Doing it the other way round is the whole idea, and it is also where the work starts. Read chapter 1

Automate the Carrying, Never the Caring

2 The symptom the owner feels | 5 min read Growth Shouldn't Feel Heavy More work meaning more people is not a law of business. It is what happens when the number of hand-offs per job stays fixed while the number of jobs goes up. Read chapter 2

Growth Shouldn't Feel Heavy

3 The cause underneath it | 5 min read Your People Are the Wiring Where systems do not connect, people become the connection. It appears on no org chart and it takes a large share of the working day. Read chapter 3

Your People Are the Wiring

4 What looking properly finds | 5 min read The Thing You're Best At Isn't in Any of Your Systems Standard software is built to be sold to everyone, so it can only hold what everyone has in common. Whatever makes a business win is by definition outside it. Read chapter 4

The Thing You're Best At Isn't in Any of Your Systems

5 The decision | 6 min read Three Things Can Happen to a System Build or buy has no answer at the level of a business, because a business is not one thing. Asked about a single system it answers immediately, and the answer is one of three. Read chapter 5

Three Things Can Happen to a System

6 Why the third fate is worth paying for | 4 min read Whatever You Can Buy, Your Competitors Can Buy A vendor’s whole economics depend on selling the same product to the people you are bidding against. Anything that arrives in a box arrives in everyone’s box. Read chapter 6

Whatever You Can Buy, Your Competitors Can Buy

7 The objection | 5 min read No Spells Custom software used to mean depending on whoever wrote it. That is the part that changed, and it is the objection that stops most businesses before anything else does. Read chapter 7

No Spells

8 The ending | 5 min read The Part Your Customers Can Feel Cost, integration and efficiency are invisible from outside a company. This is the one thing the market actually perceives, and it is where the whole sequence ends. Read chapter 8

The Part Your Customers Can Feel

The short version Questions people actually ask Eight of them, answered in a paragraph each, for anyone who would rather not read forty-two minutes of it.

Recognise the situation?

The series is the long version. The short version takes about twenty minutes and starts with somebody looking at how your business actually works.