Month: May 2019

Saturday, 8.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. – William Shakespeare

Are you in the sort of role where you have to give presentations fairly often?

Perhaps you do sales presentations, seminars or small group talks.

I haven’t had to do these for a while but have recently had more on the go.

Which, of course, meant I had to put off preparing for as long as possible.

I excuse this by retelling the story of the woodcutter who had to chop down a tree in an hour and so spent the first three-quarters of the hour sharpening the axe.

It’s more interesting finding a way to hack something than to do it in the first place.

And my approach was to think about how to plan these presentations using scripts – which of course meant learning how to make scripts like the ones used in films.

If you remember, they look typewritten with dialogue centered and other stuff everywhere.

Anyway, I also decided that I would do this using Groff, learning how to create some simple macros along the way.

Now, for the one person, maybe not even that, who is interested in this, here is some code.

\# Define macro for screenplay format
.de DG
.CW
.ps 12
.ll 5.3i
.in 1.9i
.ce
\\$1
.ad l
..

.de NM
.LP
.CW
.ps 12
..

If you save this in a file called screen.mac and call that in a Groff file formatted using ms macros – as shown in the snippet below

.so screen.mac

.NM
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE SCREENPLAY LAYOUT PRESENTATION SCRIPT

.DG "INTRODUCTION"
And my approach
was to think about
how to plan these presentations
using scripts -
which of course meant
learning how to make scripts
like the ones used in films.

You get something that looks like this:

Okay – back to the main theme of this post.

Once you’ve got your screenplay what do you do with it?

The point, I think, is to get better at telling people what you do in your business.

Now, what actors do is learn their lines so they can convince us they are someone else and draw us into the story.

How do they do that?

A paper by Nina Bandelj titled How Method Actors Create Character Roles tells us that Method-acting is a technique based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, a Russian theatre director and practitioner.

He laid down conventions, a few of which are important for us to understand if we want to apply them to our work.

Few of us like to sell, but we also like to think we do good work.

So, we need to be clear on the underlying motivation for why we do what we do.

If we’re not con artists and do a decent job then at the heart of why we do the work we do must lie a conviction that it is good work to do.

Without that underlying motivation any performance will either fall flat or come across as fake.

Which brings us to being authentic. The best actors bring their own personality to a part. They augment it rather than taking away from it.

In your business you play many parts and one of the most important is as a salesperson – which is why the best salespeople are the ones that own the business. They identify completely with their business and so come across as authentic.

Crucial to a role, however, is understanding its context and environment. Method actors do deep research, relying on acute observation to understand the part they are playing.

If you’re selling to someone that process is one of deep research. The more you understand what your client needs the better your pitch can be.

In fact, these days, you’re probably better off not bidding for any work unless the client agrees to spend at least an hour going through the situation and answering any questions you have about what they might need.

When you’re pitching, however, you’re not going to read from your script.

That’s there to learn and improve and fiddle with – but you’ll also need to be prepared to deliver without holding onto it and improvise along the way.

The improvisation is what’s going to make your delivery natural – even if it’s scripted word for word.

And then there is the look and feel – the dress and props you use to show who you are – whether that’s a business person in a suit or a cool designer in a turtleneck.

There’s a school of thought that suggests you can act yourself into feeling a certain way.

If you want to feel like you’re a confident, accomplished presenter then you could do worse than acting like an actor.

The tools and methods they use to prepare for roles are ones that you can use to prepare for the day-to-day situations you face in business.

You just need to act like you know what you’re doing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.15pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Your best strategy is to manage your creativity, not your time. People who manage their creativity get happy and rich. People who manage their time get tired. – Scott Adams

Are you one of those people that needs a break after being around other people for too long?

I am.

It’s a trait, I understand, of introverts – something that Susan Cain has popularised in her book Quiet.

Many people find themselves in situations that don’t seem designed for them – instead they’re expected to plug into whatever is there and perform at peak capacity.

But, like the increasingly dismal performance I get from batteries that I try and use in my cameras, things go wrong.

So, if you were a battery, how should you use yourself?

The first thing to understand is how you charge your battery.

Some people need quiet time to rest and regroup.

Others need to be around people, amidst the buzz and vibe to be energised and ready.

If you’re one kind of person too much of the other kind of stimulation, or lack of stimulation, is going to mean you’re just not available to do anything.

Then there’s what you use your battery to do.

Maybe you’re an AA battery and can plug into most devices – but an AA battery designed for a remote control is not going to power a professional camera for more than a few minutes.

Or are you a specialist cell, designed for specific or demanding work?

It’s also important to know what kind of work drains you quickly – what’s the power draw?

I like the Alphasmart Neo, for example. It’s a portable electronic typewriter than you can write on for a year without depleting the three AA batteries that power it.

If you built a raspberry pi based unit to do the same thing you’d get about half an hour.

I bought two NEOs instead – they’ve stopped making them so I’m stocking up for the next 40 years of writing.

Which takes us to the topic of burnout.

The reason I was musing about this topic is that working with others depletes my energy – I need some quiet time to recharge after a burst of activity.

Some people say that burnout happens because you don’t get enough rest – which makes sense in that context.

The other way of looking at burnout is that it’s about doing too much work – about pushing yourself for to long.

But there are other things we do, things that we could do for a long time and emerge at the end of that time feeling more refreshed and energised than we were when we started.

I find that’s the case with activities like writing – at the end of a session I’m not drained – if anything I’m recharged.

But clearly if you work five back to back 12 hour shifts you’re going to be in a very different situation.

All of which suggests that burnout is not about enough rest or too much work but about how you manage how you charge and discharge and what things you plug yourself into.

You’d pick the right battery for your camera – and you should probably pick the right combination of environment and activities that are best for you.

And that might be an office with a door or a loud open plan space. It might be long periods of reflection or prolonged sessions of high intensity debate.

Whatever works.

But as Adams writes in his book, The Joy Of Work, managing your creativity is what matters.

And if you want to manage your creativity what you have to first learn is how to manage your energy.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The cause is hidden. The effect is visible to all. – Ovid

If you work for a large organisation do you think that the software you work with makes you more productive?

It’s not a question with an easy and obvious answer – not for the population at large anyway.

If you do a search some of the results you get suggest that productivity has gone up while others suggest it’s gone down.

The one thing that people agree on is that software developers are more productive – they have better tools and better ways to do things.

So that’s good – the programmers are doing well out of the technological revolution.

How about everyone else?

When I looked at this a couple of years ago the data suggested that productivity was flatlining.

And the reasons for that are probably not hard to see – the effects are pretty clear.

For example, how exactly has using something like Microsoft Word made you work better?

The chances are it hasn’t – not compared to how you would have worked a long time ago.

For example, the average time to draft and finalise a document has probably gone up – because instead of writing three drafts and checking each one very carefully we can now fiddle forever and let the spellchecker catch errors – but some still slip though.

Yes, the process of printing and emailing and sharing the document is much much faster – although instead of one package in the mail you probably send several emails.

The point is not that typewriters are better than word processors – although if you’re a techie you will probably accept that plain text is better than everything else – and that’s decades old.

The point is that systems are not designed to meet the needs of the user – they’re designed to conform with what the vendor thinks the user needs.

The picture above is an adaptation of a model shown in Information, Systems and Information Systems, written by Peter Checkland and Sue Holwell.

The model shows that people have different conceptual models in their minds about what is going on.

Think of what happens when you sit down to write a document.

The mechanics of the task is to get the words on the page – but the purpose of the task is bigger than that – it might be to explain an idea to your boss or let someone know you’re going to sue them.

As a buyer you need to do something – and the act of writing a document is a small part of what’s going on in your mind.

A vendor, on the other hand, isn’t that interested in whether you’re writing a letter to a friend or an annual report for a PLC.

They’re aware of it but what they want to show you is the kinds of styles and themes and fonts that you could have.

In an ideal world the model that the vendor has in their mind will be designed to serve the model that the buyer has in their mind.

In other words before you build a system to do something you need to know what that something is being done for – you need to understand what is being served as a result of activity before you build a system to help do that activity better.

That may seem pedantic but think about it.

As a vendor what you’re trying to do often is convince a buyer that your solution will work for them unchanged.

But it never will, for the simple reason that each person you talk to will have a different system that they’re serving.

So, you have to convince them to change what they serve to what you think they should serve instead.

This is unashamedly the view of enterprise resource planning software – if you want to use it what you need to do is change your business to fit in with how the software works rather than the other way around.

Or you could think about how you could adapt your software to serve the user better – or build something from scratch.

What that needs, however, is the skill to get into the buyers mind – to take the time to make what’s in their head visible and construct the model of purposeful activity that they’re using.

Then you can compare their model with your model of activity and see what’s the same (the green) and where there are differences and what you can do about it.

That takes time.

But the chances are that it’s only the vendors who take the time to do that kind of thing that then put in solutions that really help their customers.

The rest just move on.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston

Often, in our hurry for shortcuts and easy ways to success we ignore the basic routes – the ones that will get us there but that also need us to cover some distance first.

That happens all the time, to me anyway, when it comes to business development – which is not the same as sales.

Instead, it’s what you do to make your business better, which includes getting better clients.

Maybe even more of them.

As I was reminded recently it all starts with research – but what does that mean and how can you do it more effectively?

The model in the picture above is a five-step process that I find works for me – but that I also often need to remind myself to follow.

1. Start by designing a filter

The main choice we have to make these days is not what to include but what to leave out.

It’s easy to want to be seen as someone that can do everything but that simply means you also need to know about everyone.

And, as that’s impossible it makes sense to filter the universe out there and focus on only those prospects that have a need for your services.

That filter may be a simple one that first restricts by sectors then by companies and then by people.

You might choose, for example, to focus on the oil and gas sector, the companies with a turnover of over a billion and the Technical Manager for pipes.

2. Gather information

This step is often missed out or carried out in a way that isn’t systematic or repeatable.

The irony is that with so much information around us we do a quick search for a company, read a few pages and then try and get in touch with someone.

But, if you take the time to read about the company, what it’s doing, what its finances look like and what’s being published in the news then you get a much richer picture of what’s going on.

You can’t do that in your head – you need tools.

For example, this where things like Evernote or OneNote come in or, if you like open source, something that information security professionals use like Basket Note Pads or Dradis.

3. Look for common ground

Now, with your material you can read – and look for people and what you have in common.

The point of this is not to be stalkerish but to be curious – to take the time to understand what is out there so that when you reach out you don’t waste someone else’s time.

All too often you get connections on social media that are designed to test if you react at all – and then to follow up with a series of messages.

Which probably works for people – and they make their numbers but more people must get annoyed at the approach than those that welcome it.

If you want to build a business relationship with someone new it makes sense to keep it ethical – because otherwise you’re starting it in the wrong way.

If you take the time to understand where someone is from what is publicly available and craft a message that is based around common goals and values you’ll probably do better – in terms of quality contacts anyway.

4. Seek to understand and educate

Children don’t go happily to someone new, they find someone to hide behind, peeping out warily.

That sense of being wary never leaves most of us. We’re not interested in what you’re offering – we’re just looking at that first step and seeing if we’re brave enough to take it.

So that means you’re a way away from making a sale – instead your approach should be designed to understand and educate the person you want to work with over time.

And that probably means slowing down – not pitching and selling right away.

That can be hard if it’s what you feel like you should do but it might be easier when you think of it as having to go up a number of steps before you reach the point where you can do a deal.

5. Study the results

Studying organisations and people is a matter of looking and learning.

Yes you may want to be data driven and formal but in many service businesses what matters is the one to one exchange you have with others.

But whether its data or whether its a reflection on how your last pass through the process loop went, the point is to look and learn.

Did your filter work effectively?

Did you get enough information – was there something you missed that might have helped with a conversation later on?

Are people responding to you – are you showing that there is enough common value for them to take that first step?

And then are they taking the next one, and the next one after that.

Do the basics well – even though it’s hard

The fact is that many of us would much rather be busy doing work than working on systems or improving our own approaches.

As the saying goes, however, you don’t rise to the level of your expectations – you fall to the level of your training.

It’s easy to skip any one of these steps and try and go straight to a hard close.

But by taking your time you’ll build a better business – one that works for you and helps you eventually meet your expectations.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works best. – Garry Kasparov

Saturday mornings are a time to go to the library and browse for surprises.

Today, however, I had a definite aim in mind.

The elder youngster and I had played a game of chess earlier – something I don’t really do much.

After a false start, confused by the picture on the cover that showed a chessboard that just happened to be set up wrong, we played a couple of games.

So I thought it might be a good idea to have a look and see if there were any books that might help a younger audience (and me) with our game.

After some searching I found a book called Tips for young players which, confusingly, does not have the word Chess anywhere in the title or on the spine – one assumes the authors wanted to keep it secret.

Leafing through the pages I learned there are four concepts you must understand to win – and interestingly they are four concepts that you can apply to many other things in life.

Like developing a content strategy.

I thought of content strategy mainly because I’d been talking to a friend about content and was musing on the kind of model that might help – and this one came along so let’s see if it’s any use…

1. Control or occupy the centre ground

You want your pieces to be in the centre of the board.

A bishop in the centre can reach 13 places. One in a corner can only get to seven.

The content marketing equivalent of this is to ask whether you’re in control of the space you want to play in or whether you’re on the fringes.

If you’re trying and failing to break into a crowded and noisy market maybe there’s a quiet space where you can be heard better?

Sometimes this means getting more specific about what you do.

If you’re a marketing consultant, for example, and want to stand out from the other marketing consultants out there what space would make sense for you to occupy?

The real point here is that you have to make a decision about which battlefield you are going to fight on – one that you control or one that you need to fight your way onto in the first place.

That decision could make the difference between success and failure.

2. Protect the king

As the game opens up your king gets more exposed so it’s important to move the piece to safety – to the edges as soon as possible by castling – crossing over the king and the rook.

The equivalent of this is protecting your most important asset – whatever that might be.

When it comes to content that might be your process, your writers or your research material.

Or, more importantly, it’s probably your time.

If you’re in charge of creating content you need to set time aside to do it – and you need to protect that time.

It’s almost impossible to do creative work ad-hoc.

The best way is to make it routine – to sit down at the same time and do the work – and that won’t happen unless you protect and shield that time from everyone – bosses, families and distractions.

3. Rapid development

In Chess pawns play a very important part.

Despite being the weakest pieces on the board their ability to attack and the reluctance of your opponent to sacrifice valuable pieces in exchange for a pawn let you charge forward.

And to get that charge underway you want to move pieces quickly.

Rather than doing multiple moves with one piece get them all into play.

The equivalent of a pawn in your content strategy is perhaps a blog post – something short that you can get out every day but that over time builds into a solid library of content that leads your charge.

Putting something out every week helps create a more receptive environment for the larger material you send out every few months.

Your mix of content can be likened to your mix of pieces – some short and expendable and some long, complex or expensive to create and use.

What you want to do, however, is get your content in play because the more you have the more likely it is that you’ll give the competition a “Content Shock” where they see the amount of stuff you have out there and decide that it’s easier to go and compete with someone else.

4. Take the initiative

Finally, if you’re now creating content you can’t sit back and wait for people to find you.

In Chess, once your pieces are on the board you need to take the initiative – press the attack and force your opponent to react to your moves rather than reacting to theirs.

With content that means reaching out and helping put your material in front of people – using social media and the other means at your disposal to get your message out there.

The fact is that there is much more stuff out there than people will ever have a chance to get around to looking at.

For a while – maybe a long time – you’ll need to work on recruiting people to look at your content – maybe directly, maybe through advertisements.

But you have to do something – and take the initiative or you could be waiting a long time

Summary

These four rules seem quite simple but it’s quite likely that if you look at your own content strategy you could do better on one or more of them.

Perhaps you’re creating content that’s too much like everything else out there.

Maybe you’d like to do more but just haven’t protected the time.

Or you’re a perfectionist and it just takes you a couple of months to get everything right instead of putting something out every day or week.

Or you’ve got a great content creation machine – but no one knows about it because you haven’t told them.

But when you boil all this down I’m reminded of something a friend of mine who played competitive chess once told me.

Just attack.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh