About
Management, operations and change in the real world.
I’ve been around the same family-owned manufacturing business since I was eight years old.
That means I’ve had the slightly unusual experience of watching a business from several different viewpoints — first simply growing up around it, then working within it, and eventually becoming part of the management team responsible for helping it operate, improve and change.
Over that time, I’ve learned that the formal structure of a business only tells you so much.
If there is an organisation chart, it might tell you who reports to whom. It probably won’t tell you who everybody asks when something goes wrong, where thirty years of knowledge sits, why a process works the way it does, or why changing something that looks simple on paper can sometimes be anything but.
Why family-owned SMEs are different
History matters. Relationships matter. Experience matters.
People wear several hats, roles overlap and decisions can move incredibly quickly. Those things can be enormous strengths. They can also create dependency, blurred responsibility, resistance to change and plenty of opportunities for managers to spend their days firefighting.
The questions I’m interested in
How do you introduce better systems without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
How do you improve accountability without losing loyalty?
How do you capture knowledge without making experienced people feel as though you are trying to replace it?
How do you bring technology, data and new ways of working into a business built largely on experience and relationships?
And how do you know whether an improvement has genuinely made things better?
Sometimes the biggest improvement is simply making it easier for people to do a good job.
Where the Org Chart Ends is where I explore those questions: operations, leadership, manufacturing, systems, culture, technology, improvement and the reality of trying to make a business better while still keeping today’s operation running.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Some things I write about will have worked. Some will be ideas I’m still trying to understand. And occasionally I’ll probably write about something that looked brilliant on a spreadsheet and considerably less brilliant once it met the real world.
The views expressed here are my own. Examples may be anonymised, adapted or combined to explore broader management themes rather than describe individual people or organisations.
