Building a non-anxious business

The language of anxiety gives me some language for the zeitgeist in which we find ourselves. New AI tools launch every day, LinkedIn gurus recommend this GTM strategy or that bot, and doing more with less becomes the ultimate goal toward which all our energy points. It feels as though, like one colleague wrote on LinkedIn today, the goal posts are shifted ever forward, which raises the question: By whom, exactly? I’m beginning to think that sensation is anxiety made visible.

A non-anxious company feels different. It’s free to not continually push out the goal posts based on the latest trend. It knows who it is, what it wants, where it’s going, and how to get there. It doesn’t chase fads. It’s methodical, patient, focused. It exudes our core values of calm, care, and craft.

I wouldn’t describe Snapmarket as a non-anxious company yet, but I want it to become one. Our docs.snapmarket.co is in part an effort to define who we are, where we’re going, and how we get there.

The reason I’m thinking of this today is because anxiety can show up in the P&L in real ways. Non-anxious companies keep their employees and customers longer. They stick to their pricing and margins. They burn out fewer people. They make clear decisions that last, which allows their strategy, marketing, or labor to compound over time.

I made a commitment to write every day on this newsletter. If I abandon it because it’s “not working,” I may cut short the very thing required to see the fruit I hope for: time.

But before I can build a non-anxious company, I have to become a non-anxious person. Two threads help me think through this.

The first is integration. I’m reading a philosopher on how reality is multidimensional: A business is economic, but it’s also ethical, aesthetic, lingual, social, and more. He argues that there are fifteen “modal aspects” to people, places, and things, including businesses. We often flatten reality into just one or two of these aspects. In business we often think of just the economic aspect, for instance, but when pipeline, utilization, and output become our only lens, people start to feel like inputs, and we make poor decisions because we’ve lost sight of everything else that’s true about our work.

The second is placemaking. Our knowledge, our work, and our businesses live in particular places, relationships, and cultures. It’s tempting to find the latest trend on LinkedIn and import it as “best practice” when, in reality, our own teams may have better judgment about what’s needed. Generic systems strip away local knowledge, making brands less particular and therefore less effective. Wendell Berry spent his life writing about this in agrarian terms.

I think our Story System Send method, far from another generic system, can actually help restore a person, a company, even an industry into an integrated whole. Quite a big claim, I know. But it’s something I keep thinking about.

For me to be a non-anxious leader, I need to clearly understand my identity, my worth, what I bring to the table. In other words, I need to know and believe my own story. Then I can build systems around that story, like a list of priorities, a focused calendar or budget, and a project management or communication cadence, that allows me to live into the story I’ve adopted. Then I can non-anxiously send my work into the real world with real relationships in their particular places.

The fruit of this method will be calm, caring craftsmanship, reinforcing itself toward a less anxious business.