Month: November 2019

Saturday, 7.20pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The law that entropy always increases – the second law of thermodynamics – holds I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much worse for Maxwell equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. – Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, in The Nature of the Physical World.

I am, it has to be said, quite lazy.

I dislike effort – if something takes effort then it seems like something that should be looked at quite closely – well before you start to think about considering doing it.

This is not the standard advice from most people.

Most people are can-do optimists who believe that they can overcome any obstacles as long as they persevere, apply themselves and never ever give up.

And there is a problem with this kind of thinking and to see why let’s look at diets.

I was listening to a talk by Dr Michael Greger introducing his new book How not to diet where he discusses the evidence around healthy eating.

Somewhere in there he talks about diets – which we’ve all been on.

And he says something like you can make anything happen when you apply enough of a forcing effect.

That made my ears prick up.

It’s probably not an actual term but that idea of applying a forcing effect to make something go your way probably resonates with you as well.

If you go on a low sugar, low carb, high carb, low fat – whatever diet – what you’re doing is forcing yourself to stick with a particular programme.

And when you do this two things happen – depending on how long you carry on.

In the first instance you start to see weight loss as the changes you make start to have an effect – one that shows up in the scales.

Let’s leave the debate around whether it’s fat, water or protein being lost to others – the point is that you see a result.

But then, when you come off the diet, the weight quite often comes back on.

That’s one effect.

The other is that if you stay on the diet it starts working less well – you eventually plateau and further improvement stops.

So what’s going on here?

In the first instance when you remove the forcing effect the system returns to normal.

In the second instance when you maintain the forcing effect the system adapts to the new reality and stabilises at a new normal.

Now imagine that a new CEO comes in and shakes everything up in your business.

For a while, things change – but if that CEO moves on and the people still stay – then eventually the old (bad?) habits creep back in.

If the CEO stays then the people start to change – some old, good people leave because they can’t work with the new person.

New people come in and a new stable configuration results – usually bringing with it interesting new organisational conflicts, issues and problems.

The system will always have its revenge in the end.

The quote that starts this post is about entropy – about how everything tends to disorder – and that is the natural state of things.

Which is why it’s strange that we spend so much time fighting entropy.

For example, if you do any kind of work it’s almost certain that you will be reporting on some kind of metric.

For example, if you send out proposals you probably have a spreadsheet where you list all the proposals you’ve sent and their value.

This takes effort – going through your documents and collecting the information – and it’s more than likely that the spreadsheet lags behind the actual number and value of proposals.

But this is normal – every month people ask for this and people do the work.

If your sales team don’t send in the numbers you crack the whip, change things around.

An alternative – in my perfect text based, Unix driven universe, would be to have all proposals simply processed by a script that pulled out the relevant numbers and sends an email.

Or even better – focus on the clients and let the proposals simply emerge from the conversations you have.

Naturally.

The point is that you don’t have to create an effort based system – you can create an effortless one.

But that also takes effort.

Some people live their lives and work like they’re always at the gym, on a treadmill, or pumping weights.

And if you’re always stood there holding up those weights, when do you get the time to relax, look around, and appreciate what’s around you?

Maybe, when you really think about it, forcing something to happen doesn’t work for diets in particular and life in general.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 6.22pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. – Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

It’s time to think about a better way to get things done.

If you have worked on any project you’ve probably come to a point where there is too much to do.

You’re overwhelmed with the amount of things that needs to be done, there just isn’t enough time, the client is insisting on the finish date and stress levels are climbing.

So what do you do?

If you’re like most people you talk to your manager because it’s their job to help you out.

And they do try and help – usually by looking around to see who else has some capacity and can spend some time on your project.

Seems reasonable, right?

But this is probably the single worst thing you can do to yourself.

Adding people to a project, even experienced, skilled people is going to delay your project even more than it already is.

And Frederick Brooks explained why in The Mythical Man-Month.

Adding people only speeds thing up when those people don’t have to talk to each other.

If you’re picking rice then having more people picking rice will get the job done faster than having less people picking rice.

It doesn’t work that way with knowledge work.

And that’s because you need to get people up to speed with what needs doing – explain the data set, explain your design, train them in the stuff you’ve already done.

And by the time you do all that it’s past the deadline you’ve done less in the last two weeks than you did in the previous two when you were all by yourself.

So, say no to help.

The next thing your manager will suggest is whether there are any simple tasks you can hand over to an intern or a junior employee.

This again seems helpful and reasonable.

But it’s not.

Someone inexperienced working on something will suck up time and make mistakes – mistakes that you will need to fix in the now much less time you have available.

It’s far better to build a tool to get the task done – even if it takes you longer to build the tool and even if you have to throw it away.

This is wisdom from the Unix philosophy and it will help you immensely when you’re under pressure and the problem you have is a technical rather than human one.

One kind of problem you can solve – with the other, you can only hope.

The final thing your manager will insist on is that everything needs to get done – no cutting corners.

But then again if you’re up against it that’s what you need to do.

Not cut corners exactly but ruthlessly cut away at the scope of what you’re trying to do.

The point is that there will always be things that are more important and things that are less important.

Leave the less important ones for later – your client will be happier at getting core functionality that works than getting an incomplete product that doesn’t run at all.

Here’s the thing.

If you’re under pressure stay away from people – focus on the work.

Because that’s something you can actually do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 7.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

One goal of law – as we learn in law school from the first day of contracts – is to deter bad behavior. – Marvin Ammori

It takes skill to work well with other people.

I, for example, like having control over what I’m doing.

I like being able to write and publish this post without really having to involve anyone else.

And that’s fine – but as an old friend said “To go fast, go alone. To go far, go with company.”

And that is true, you will achieve more when you work with other people.

But which other people?

And under what conditions?

This is where a 2013 paper by Thomas Hellmann and Veikko Thiele called Contracting Among Founders may give us some insights.

It’s a fairly symbol heavy treatment of the topic and deals with founders that are equal – in terms of skills and resources – but it brings out some of the main points we need to consider when thinking about working with others.

Let’s start with a team thinking about working together – possible founders all.

They can agree an up front contract where they set out in writing what each one’s shareholding is in the business.

Or they can wait and see how they work together before signing anything – a so called delayed contract.

The ideal situation is that either option results in a “dream team”, a group that works well together and where everyone contributes something essential.

The drawback of an up front contract is that you tie yourself to someone who they doesn’t do any work but is still entitled to a share of everything.

This results in a “dud team” and you have to figure out how to get out of it – which usually means buying the other person out with your money or money you borrow – and people usually don’t like lending you money to do that sort of thing: they want it to go into and grow the business.

The drawback of a delayed contract is that you put all the work in and your partner, who is savvier and more ruthless than you steals what’s there or walks away with the business leaving you with nothing.

In this case you have winners and losers and lots of angst and unhappiness.

Maybe some lawsuits.

Hellmann and Thiele point you to the story of The Social Network.

Now, if you have a dream team then you get an optimal situation – equal shareholdings where everyone is happy.

An alternative option, if you don’t know each other, is to tie the shares to a vesting schedule.

This is something where your share is released as you hit milestones or spend time in the business.

The advantage is that it’s in proportion to the value you bring.

The disadvantage is that the milestones or value cannot always be measured precisely.

After all, were you lucky or skillful when you made that enormous sale and hit all your targets?

The other thing we need to remember, which isn’t really touched on in the paper, is that your shareholding is really a claim on profits – and those profits come from customers.

And they come because you do something of value – these days mostly using your intellectual property or IP.

And the value that you’re trying to hold on to is the asset value of that IP and the cash flows from those customer contracts.

As models go this is probably a fairly good first pass at outlining the issues you will face working with other people.

You can see this working with entrepreneurial teams, intrapreneurial teams or plain office teams – the dynamics of work and reward play out roughly the same way.

One question is whether in a postmodern world where you work with networks some of this ownership angst can be managed through radical openness.

For example, if the first iteration of work you did created all IP under very permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses then you would have the option to split later and have each of the founders take the IP created so far and make what they could of it.

And that would probably help early customers as well.

Later on, when you know the team is working you can arrange a more tied in sort of contract.

These days it often makes sense to live together before getting married.

Then again, if you know, you know and you might as well tie the knot.

Or perhaps you should see lots of people before you settle down.

But the real point is who knows what’s going to work – there is no perfect answer.

It all depends on the situation and opportunity.

And you can’t reduce all that stuff to a formula.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful. – James Lovelock

I am sometimes asked what the point is of doing an MBA.

In fact, a recent Economist suggested that interest in the degree was waning.

I suppose that’s because it costs you so much to do one that you wonder if you will ever make the money back.

There are two reasons one might start a such a programme of study.

One is for what it can do for you in the future – help you progress in your career, getting a better job or run your business more effectively.

For me, what it did was help explain the past.

The early phase of study – school and a first degree is about learning something useful – something that is useful to other people – people who are willing to pay you for your time and effort.

Then, after a decade or so, you’ve experienced enough of the world of work to know get quite jaded with the whole thing.

And that’s where the next phase of study is so useful – it helps you understand the experiences you’ve had.

Of course, that only happens, if you actually start that programme of study.

These two approaches, doing things because they help you with a possible new future, and doing things because they help you make sense of the past seem diametrically opposed.

So which one should you use – is it either / or, or both / and?

Take, for example, the book The future as history by Robert L. Heilbroner, written around sixty years ago.

It’s written during a time of change, post war, the rise of communism and the liberation of the world’s people.

Heilbroner argues that optimism is a fundamental trait of Americans – who take it for granted that striving leads to success – but that for most of history that’s not been the case.

Equally important in the history of the world has been inertia – a predisposition to cling to old and tested ways and a reluctance to engage with the new.

The book seems to be a lament of pessimism – a view that things must get much worse before they get better.

And looking back, perhaps he was right – the second half of the last century has seen its fair share of misery.

Change is not easy – it takes generations.

The easy optimism of people today is a result of a few hundred years of change – after all it’s the time when we watch A Christmas Carol again and are reminded how different the world once was.

And still is in many places.

The fact is that there are two kinds of people – the optimists who push and push – seeking to overcome inertia and get moving.

And there are those who sit back content that there is nothing they can do – watching the strivers and predicting their failure.

Take an issue like climate change.

It’s not easy – even someone like James Lovelock can’t see how to sort it out.

Can we avoid a climate crisis?

Or are we so optimistic that we believe we can live with the consequences?

Or – at least those of us lucky enough to be less affected?

The fact is that unless those who have the ability to make a difference act nothing will change.

The management of a company cannot blame everything on the workers – they are the ones with the control and the knowledge – and therefore the ones who must act.

Making a difference starts with knowing how.

And if you’re not sure how – then it’s time to start studying.

Now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. – Samuel Butler

Things get messy quickly when you start digging into the details of anything.

In yesterday’s post, for example, I went back to Deming’s words on quality – and how that is the place from which a sustainable business springs.

But, as Deming writes, talking about quality isn’t enough and the next thing he brings up is a flow diagram – a picture of how things happen when you look at something like production as a system.

That seems pretty clear – but it can hide some fundamental issues.

One way of studying something – your life, your business, your relationships – is to map out whatever is going on right now.

For example, you could look at a function in your business and draw a flow diagram from start to finish of what goes where and what happens next.

But what do you have when you do that?

You end up with a picture of reality – what you already have in front of you.

Now, maybe that’s useful and you can start to question that reality and ask whether something should be where it is or not.

But what you do, when you do that, is tinker at the edges, smooth out the surface.

You don’t look deep.

A different way to look at things is to ask what you would do if the whole thing was destroyed last night.

What would you do if you came home and your house was empty – if burglars had come and taken everything you owned.

What would you do if your business was taken hostage – all your data was wiped clean and you had nothing left on the company’s servers?

What would you do if your operations burned down – every last machine gone and every part destroyed.

Would you build everything back exactly the same?

Would you restock your house with all those Christmas presents and toys that have been languishing for years in the loft?

Would you make the same products in the same way?

Russell Ackoff calls this kind of thinking Idealized Design and wrote a book with the same name.

In that he talks about the process you should follow.

There are two parts to it – idealization and realization.

In idealization what you’re trying to do understand the mess and figure out what you need to avoid doing in the future.

And then you figure out what you do want.

Then, in realization, you make it happen – with people, plans and controls and management.

And I find all of that slightly positivist and depressing – a little too structured and engineered to perhaps actually work in the real world without a huge amount of effort and stress.

Let me explain.

It makes a lot of sense to ask what should be here? rather than what is here?

If you describe reality then what you have at the end is a poor model of reality – after all, reality itself is the richest model there is.

If you describe what reality should be like now you have a useful model – one that can be compared to reality and used as a source of questions.

For example, if you think about your perfect day and it involves long stretches of writing at a beachside cafe and what you actually do is spend every day commuting four hours into a hellhole of a city – then you have a model and a reality you can contrast and compare.

That kind of investigation into a mess results in models and barriers – things that are stopping you from having your perfect life or business.

Ackoff talks about asking what you want right now – not what you want five years from now and that makes sense.

But in the first chapter of the book he also writes about possible futures and how to avoid future destruction.

These are tricky things because we are very bad at getting calls on the future right.

But we are quite good at short term thinking – surviving right now.

The challenge is to find a balance.

For example, you could carry on commuting and wishing you were writing on that beach – nothing would change.

You could quit your job and go spend a year on the beach – which might be a nice year but not go down well with your other half, children or bank manager.

Or you could take a holiday on a beach for a week and see if you actually enjoyed doing that kind of thing.

I suppose the point is that execution is not that hard once you know what you need to do.

Most of us are actually pretty good at execution.

Two things slow us down.

The first is not knowing what to do.

The second is being held back by all the stuff and crap that’s in your life right now.

But here’s the thing – if you can’t figure out the ideal way to do something when you’re working entirely in your mind’s imagination with no barriers how do you think you’ll do it when you’re in the real world and held back by all sorts of barriers?

Change is hard and it’s not as simple as following a process where you first idealize and then realize.

At the same time it is as simple as first understanding what should be and what is – and then working out what you need to do.

Sometimes prescriptions and processes are really checklists and reminders – they are there to see if you’ve forgotten to do something rather than rigid routes to follow.

Because the one thing that you’ll find is that your road has to be your own.

Once someone else walks their road – it vanishes behind them.

Leaving only a story.

Which might not be true.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh