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“There’s one thing I regret about working with Veronica – not having met her sooner! She had a clear perspective on the challenges I was facing and was quick to offer me the latest tools for my projects.”
— Niki A., Executive Coach
The Disney Organizational Mandala
in Business TipsSCALING:lab Blog
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What would it mean to form a company whose organization is shaped like a mandala, instead of like a tree or line graph? We can look back at the first decades of Disney for the answer.
Walt Disney understood that the creative masterminds in his budding company would require a lot of access to him and a lot of access to each other in order to collaborate cross departmentally and produce the best results. The organizational structure he ultimately developed looks very much the shape of a mandala, the Eastern geometric circle best known for meditation on ephemera.
#Disney invented an organizational structure to help him #scale that looks a whole lot like a mandala. Click To Tweet
It is uncertain whether or not Disney intended this, for the mandala was not well known in the early twentieth century in the United States. But let’s rewind a little bit. Why did this come about?
Disney’s Organizational Genius
Walt Disney was heavily involved in his studio’s first feature film productions and shorts. He worked hand in hand with his creative directors and artists in order to create a superior product, which created a legacy that still resounds around the world today. For better or worse, Disney is known for its creative powerhouse.
However, as the company scaled, Disney ran into a problem. He could see that his work as CEO of the Disney studio would take him away from creative direction, and feared the films might suffer as a result of a conventional organizational model. So he decided to create a new type of company structure.
The Company Mandela is Born
Above you can see the original company structure devised by Walt Disney himself. Notice that it is a company organized in concentric circles, with Walt Disney’s direction placed at the center. He wanted his teams to have open access to him, as well as centralized touchpoints throughout the organization, so there were no silos as found in a conventional company structure.
A conventional company structure looks more like a tree, but upside down. The trunk equals the C-Suite and, from there, the branches are made of managing partners, directors, team leads, and ultimately, the workers. They are all in their own silos and may cross collaborate, but to a limited capacity.
These two images look very different. Disney didn’t want what happens so commonly to the CEO in business scaling. The CEO gets so far removed from the newest hires and entry level workers that the CEO’s ability to influence and direct culture, collaboration, and innovation becomes diluted by its managers.
Think about it like this: the managers and team leads in between the staff and CEO are the diluting factor. There are so many lines of communication to go through before one can reach the CEO that the CEO’s influence is ultimately diluted and even destroyed.
This is my prediction for what happened at Amazon. Amazon was once a creative powerhouse. However, it is well known that entry level and factory level workers today report a difficult (to put it politely) working environment. It is my guess that the company culture was not organized in such a way that curated the ideals and influences of the original leaders. Like so many, they assumed that whatever original environment was developed would linger.
Your Job as CEO
Many of my followers are freelancers and small-preneurs. They own small businesses with one to five employees. Thus, their influence remains high across their teams. Unfortunately, these founders don’t realize that, in order to scale, sell, or retire, that intimate level of connection and communication between founder and employee will disappear, and the company culture will be vulnerable to any outside influence.
Have a look again at Walt Disney’s organizational structure and consider for yourself: is this the type of legacy you wish to leave in your company when you leave it? Or are you satisfied with letting whatever influences may come along change the course of what you created?
I’m here to help you scale if you need it.
What Clients Say
"There's one thing I regret about working with Veronica - not having met her sooner! She had a clear perspective on the challenges I was facing and was quick to offer me the latest tools for my projects."— Niki A., Executive Coach
How to Use Obsidian to Amplify Your Business
in Business TipsSCALING:lab Blog
A resource for business owners & entrepreneurs who want to reclaim their time.
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Entrepreneurs tend to have big ideas, and lots of them. Not a month goes by that a client asks, “I want to do X in the future — how to do I take notes on it now?”
This gets into my methodology called Skyscraper Theory™. It is imperative to build the blueprint of your future business now, not only so you have an idea as to where you are going, but also to give you a place to put those brilliant ideas.
Enter Obsidian. This robust app has been pigeonholed as a place for note taking. However, for someone building a Skyscraper Business, Obsidian is the perfect tool to manage those myriad ideas and map out your next big move.
What Is Obsidian?
Obsidian is a web app that stores all your notes in the cloud. What makes it unique is its linking feature — all notes can link together to form a bigger idea over time.
But that would be selling Obsidian short. Obsidian has a robust open source network of collaborators that are continuously adding new features to the app. Features such as slide show capabilities, canvas mapping, and even a plugin that imports your highlights from your eReader.
With Obsidian, everything lives on your computer in markdown files, meaning even if Obsidian were to disappear tomorrow, any other program can open those files and read them. Markdown files are also very light weight, meaning they don’t take much space on your hard drive. Obsidian also offers cloud services and the ability to share your documents between devices through various means (some free, some paid).
How to Use Obsidian to Manage Your Skyscraper
Obsidian’s notes link together as you see fit. Let’s take this blog for example. The only way this blog is linked to any other idea within my website is through the tags I place at the bottom, or through categorizing. That creates a pool of information, but doesn’t do much to build a cohesive idea over time.
Inside Obsidian, one too can add tags, but tags are the weakest way to manage one’s library. In fact, I only use tags to remind myself of the ideas I am still building up or are poised for publishing.
Obsidian has an incredibly robust search function, so any note I look for containing the word “entrepreneur” will be found for me. No tags needed.
Instead, one can link their notes together. This is where it gets interesting. These links eventually form a map of ideas that drive forward one’s thinking. As a particular idea or note receives more links, it gets bigger on the map. Here is an example of my map of links growing over time:
It’s pretty fun to watch, but even more fun to interact with as ideas build on each other. Not only will you never lose an idea that you have for your future business, but you can build on it and link it with existing activities so it stays integrated inside your Skyscraper.
Let’s take a look at another tool within Obsidian — the Canvas tool. Canvas is a super easy mind mapping tool that allows you to visually move around notes to see their relationships. But you don’t have to use notes inside the Canvas — you can simply add your own ideas and shape the relationships therein. Here is a screenshot of a small Canvas I created for this blog post.
One can add images, existing notes, color-code, and more. The above Canvas is an extremely basic one, but it shows how the Canvas can create a visual representation of your ideas and Skyscraper. What’s more, it is zoom-able, meaning you can zoom in or out as it gets more complex. Really, the sky is the limit!
There is a lot more that Obsidian can do for your business — far more than an introductory blog post can offer. That’s why I’m hosting an Obsidian Workshop inside SCALING:lab in July. Come on over to the Academy to join us!
What Clients Say
"There's one thing I regret about working with Veronica - not having met her sooner! She had a clear perspective on the challenges I was facing and was quick to offer me the latest tools for my projects."— Niki A., Executive Coach
Why LGBTQ+ Inclusion Training is Critical to Small Business Leaders and Solopreneurs Alike
in Business TipsSCALING:lab Blog
A resource for business owners & entrepreneurs who want to reclaim their time.
Become a SCALING:lab Member and receive the articles + case studies a week before they’re live to the public..
*** Articles are first published to SCALING:lab — sign up to get the first look. ***
“I don’t need LGBTQ+ Inclusion training,” you may think. “I’m a solopreneur / I work for myself freelance / I don’t have a team. I’m an ally. That’s enough.”
WRONG.
At the least, you may be accidentally offending your colleagues. At the worst, you are erasing identities, losing out on opportunities to build strategic partnerships, and failing your customers.
My Colleague Erased My Identity
I was recently contacted by a colleague about a Pride Month article regarding LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. It’s well known at this point that I am out and proud as an LGBTQ+ entrepreneur and that I offer inclusion training to my clients, so I was not surprised to be approached and was thankful my colleague had thought of me.
What did surprise me was the gatekeeping that followed from someone I had until then considered a friend due to her lack of understanding of the LGBTQ+ community.
“Wait, your partner is male, isn’t he?” she asked after I said yes to the opportunity. I replied that my partner is, indeed, male, knowing what would come next.
“They said they want only non-hetero relationships for the article,” she backpedaled.
BAM.
Right there.
That’s the stuff that makes LGBTQ+ people in straight-passing relationships roll their eyes and pull out their hair. While I know my colleague meant well in trying to connect two highly regarded entrepreneurs, my colleague’s lack of understanding led to the erasure of both my and my partner’s identities. As a result, I had to out my partner and talk more deeply about my own sexuality than I typically do in professional spheres just to be seen as valid.
Ouch.
This is why I’m so passionate about providing LGBTQ+ Inclusion Training for small businesses, solopreneurs, and freelancers. Will we also work on your employee handbook? Are there opportunities to shape your language on social media to be more supportive and inclusive? Of course. Of course we can do that during the training.
But the most important part of the LGBTQ+ Inclusion Training is helping my fellow entrepreneurs understand the LGBTQ+ community so when they want to make a good referral or work with a client who is part of the community, they don’t accidentally gatekeep or erase their identity simply because the client doesn’t ‘look queer.’
If you want help with LGBTQ+ Inclusion so you can be a business leader that is supportive and knowledgeable, I’m happy to discuss.
Updated June 2023.
What Clients Say
"There's one thing I regret about working with Veronica - not having met her sooner! She had a clear perspective on the challenges I was facing and was quick to offer me the latest tools for my projects."— Niki A., Executive Coach