Month: March 2024

Friday, 9.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The only thing new is you finding out about something. Like nothing’s really new, but you reinvent it for yourself and find your inner voice. – Mike Watt

We just watched the film “Up”. Again.

It’s a sad film. And a happy one. In other words, a complex one.

Here’s the thing.

You build your life with every decision you make. Every choice. These choices are like moves – you probably had more than one option – so which one did you pick? And are you happy with the choice you made?

I wrote about moves some time back. We’re in the middle of a seismic shift in the way things are done, just like we were ten years ago, and like our parents went through the ten years before that. Things always change. The question is how do we respond?

I often start by picking up a book. Or discovering one.

This time, I uncovered one. Or, at least, it turned up as we tidied a corner of the house. It’s Tom Peter’s ‘the brand you’

Over the next few posts I’m going to work through this book – first trying to understand the ideas and then seeing if I can apply them.

Let’s begin.

Jobs are changing, like they changed before and will change in the future.

If you want to stay relevant you need to think of yourself as an independent contractor, someone who provides professional services – whether you’re in a job or not. This is what Peters calls “brand you”.

As a professional, there are three things you must do to stay relevant.

First, you need to get very good at something. You need to have a craft and practice and practice so that you are one of the best out there at doing what you do.

Second, you need projects that stretch you and showcase your learning. Projects that are impressive, that people pay attention to. This is the evidence people need to believe that you can do what you say you do. You’re only as good as the last thing you’ve done.

And third, you need to network. You need to find a way to reach other people and make them aware you exist. The problem for most of us is not that we’re rejected but that we’re ignored because there is so much interesting stuff out there.

In the next post let’s look at how to say what we do in a single sentence.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.22pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before. – Franz Kafka

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame had a quote about working smart rather than working hard which I am going to slice and serve up for a different flavour.

Manage your energy, not your time. People who manage their energy get happy and rich. People who manage their time get tired.

When I was younger everything was important. Productivity mattered. Being productive was about moving paper, about getting things done. About ticking off everything on the list.

At a certain stage in life that’s a good thing. When you’re young the most important thing is to be reliable. If people can rely on you they will give you more to do, and the more you do the more you learn, and the more you learn the more people can rely on you to do the right thing.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

When you start you say yes to everything. Later in life you start to realise that everything doesn’t matter equally. Some things are more important than others and the skill you need is not to get things done but to work out what’s worth doing.

And I don’t think worth is all about money.

In fact, taking money into consideration is the wrong way to do anything.

In my culture, there are four ways to get peace of mind.

You can act. You can pray. You can meditate. And you can think.

If you’re reading this blog you can probably figure out which practice I lean towards.

We experience life a minute at a time – but it also speeds by without warning.

Why spend it tired?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 12 March 2023

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision. – Eleanor Roosevelt

In a standard lifetime we make only a handful of truly important decisions.

Often, we don’t even realise we’re making them unless we pay attention.

At every moment a million possibilities await you but choosing one path closes off others.

Or so I used to think.

I’m interested in making good decisions. As we all should be. As we should teach our children. I remember one of my children’s primary school teachers laughing about having to run after four-year olds shouting “Make good choices!”

There’s a book called the three secrets of wise decision making that I go back to every once in a while.

The first “secret” is to be rational. Look at the information in front of you with your brain switched on rather than your emotions. Fear and greed make for poor long term decisions. Reserve them for the times when you need to deal with tigers or diamonds.

The danger is that you make a decision and then look for reasons to justify your choice. A good indicator of whether you’re being rational, says the writer, is whether you react to information that challenges your ideas with interest or with defensiveness or anger.

You have to live with the consequences of your decision, and it is your ten-year older self that will look back with approval or regret at a decision that cannot be changed.

The second secret is “creativity” – which is really quite hard to define but you know it when you see it.

It’s easy to get stuck and think that the options you see are the only ones you have. Stepping out of the box seems impossible but it’s something you still have to do – or something you should try and do before settling for an option.

It’s dangerous to say you can’t do something or something can’t be done because there is probably someone busy getting on doing just that as you speak.

The last secret is “balanced judgement”, which is about formally taking the effort to consider multiple factors that matter. The simplest way to think about this is to draw a set of lines and look at them as a survey instrument. You need more than one question on there to get some balance into your decision making.

There are a number of tools that can help you get better at doing each of these steps but one of my favourites is the decision tree – something that sits behind all these approaches.

The decision tree represents all the possible futures that you can have, how the decision you make now ripples through and creates new pathways or closes other ones down.

Sometimes you can straddle two branches for a while, at other times you have to pick one or the other.

It’s never easy to make these choices. You have to figure out what you’re heading for: are you maximising opportunity; or minimising regret?

And, as I often do, the deciding criteria is the one set out in ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’.

Will making this choice give you peace of mind?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. – Carl Jung

What would you do differently knowing what you now know?

What rules would you suggest your children follow?

A few of mine that come to mind are simple ones.

1. Be early. If you can’t be early, be on time.
2. Always take notes.
3. Learn how to make good choices about money, starting with keeping accounts.

Others are harder, and they start to contradict themselves.

Like.

1. Work hard. But also work smart.
2. Cultivate a deep knowledge of a field. But also have a broad understanding.
3. Study hard and get a good job. But you could lose it at any time.

There’s a thing that happens when you first go to a foreign place – once you see something you can’t unsee or unlearn it – and you often forget that others don’t know what you know.

There’s an experiment that shows this with young children.

If you put a box of chocolates on a table and ask a child what he or she thinks is in there, the answer will be “chocolate.”

If you open the box and show the child that the box is, in fact, full of pencils, close the box and ask the question again – this time you’ll get the answer “pencils.”

The interesting thing is that if you now ask the child what another child will say if asked the same question (a child that doesn’t know what’s in the box) the answer will be “pencils.”.

Now that the child knows what’s in there it’s hard for them to imagine that someone else doesn’t also know what they know.

But, as you know, they don’t.

So are there things we should talk about because it’s possible that not everyone knows?

I think there are – but there is also a problem – it’s very hard to just “know” something. Even if you’re told about it you have to go through a certain kind of experience to be able to appreciate it.

It doesn’t matter how many descriptions you read of a foreign place – going there teaches you something you just can’t learn from the explanation.

Perhaps media is different – if you watch a documentary or movie – effectively living the experience through a simulation – perhaps that makes a difference.

You can see how complicated this is. Perhaps that’s why YouTube is such a learning revolution – it makes it possible for us to follow along rather than learn through instruction and then practice on our own – which may explain these 13 hour sessions where you see someone build an app from scratch and learn how it’s done.

Let’s get back to my point – what models do we need now?

First, what models did we already have?

400 years ago we had butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Small businesses, one-person bands, providing products and services.

200 years ago we had factories and the rise of jobs. Factories needed people to do specialised work and needed people to manage others doing work and we ended up with the modern industrial system.

Which is how we think of work even now. A job. Something we do from 9-5.

Then you have post-modern ideas of work that leave the factory model behind and instead operate a network model of some kind. One where connections and small groups do something for someone else.

The last 50 or so years have resulted in a bunch of jobs that have to do with administration – what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs. I’m not sure that’s fair because just like factory work needed supervisors knowledge work needs people who do something similar – administration.

Where are we now?

Well, the rise of generative AI could mean that lots of people will not be hired to do certain things – like copywriting or programming because people can use those tools to get the results they want.

But I think it might be more complicated than that.

Average writers and programmers may be able to save time and have the AI write average content for them.

But good writers and programmers will also get the AI to write for them, and because they’re good they’ll probably pull further ahead.

After all, if you give both an average hobby cyclist and a professional racer the same new shiny bike, which one will do better?

The only way for someone to catch up with someone who is doing better now is to have a better bike. And that’s not what’s happening.

Each innovation will end up making those who are already doing well do even better – widening the gap between the have and the have-nots.

These are not equalisation technologies – they are difference multipliers.

It means that if you start a business now you need fewer people to get more done.

Twenty years ago I saw businesses doing things with 20 people that I could do with a spreadsheet. The same thing applies now – you can build capability that doesn’t need as many people as before. That’s what technology does.

I was watching a programme where a character was searching for his goat.

The goat mattered because it gave him 2 litres of milk a day and his family survived on that. That’s less than a pound a day. Although in 2021 it turns out that it was more like £15. So an improvement.

But that’s not the point.

If you’re one of the have’s – count yourself lucky.

Because this is a multi-generational challenge to address for the have not’s.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something – this side of it, if you like, doing interviews – is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project. – Rowan Atkinson

A few years ago content marketing was the thing – you were supposed to show what you knew and how you could help by sharing your knowledge and teaching others about a specific niche that you specialised in.

Focus. That was what mattered.

Are things any different now?

Probably not. If anything focus is even more important. Even if we don’t want it to be.

Let’s back up.

I heard a new term today – “content spam”.

That’s where people keep putting out content, bombarding you with it on the basis that some people will engage with it and some of those will commission work from you.

The model there is nothing new. It’s a numbers game. Put enough stuff out there and the law of large numbers says that someone will eventually want what you’re selling.

But there’s an investment of time that goes into doing this – you need to create and share material and it makes sense to do that about something very specific.

That’s because no one wants a generalist. They want someone with deep expertise in solving the particular problem they have.

Deep expertise and a strong track record is what you need to get over the trust barrier with a prospective client.

But the time you spend developing that expertise is time that you probably don’t spend marketing yourself.

Marketing has a cost. It’s either going to cost your time and money or it’s going to cost someone else’s time and money. The person with access to a market needs to get paid. You will always have a cost of customer acquisition.

There’s also the question of time. Sometimes you’re early to the party and it’s about being first to get a new customer. Sometimes you’re late and it’s about taking away a customer from someone else.

So what is good marketing now?

It’s whatever works to get you noticed by a prospective customer who then starts a conversation with you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. – Tim O’Brien

I’ve been thinking about activity systems recently and trying to work out what I think they could be.

That’s a little complicated, so let’s back up.

Peter Checkland writes about human activity systems in “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice”. What does he mean by this term?

Let’s start at the end, first there’s the idea of a “system”.

We all use the word system but sometimes mean different things. For instance, a computer system is something you can point to that has components and connections. The transport system is something you can point to with planes, trains, automobiles and so on. The judicial system is something you can point to, with judges and police and jails. The education system is something you can point to, with students and buildings and teachers. All these uses of the word “system” have some kind of connection to a thing out there that you can point to, with parts and interconnections and emergent behaviour.

Checkland uses the word system to refer to something that might exist only in your mind – a description of a thing from a particular point of view.

This is a little abstract and not everyone agrees that it makes sense.

His argument is that the other words matter.

What we’ve got is the existence of humans and so the “system” we’re talking about doesn’t really exist out there because it can only exist inside someone’s head.

You can’t point to the “system”, you can only suggest that it’s made up of certain parts.

And if you group those parts and call them by a name that doesn’t really make sense to anyone who doesn’t already know the parts.

This is a big bit of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance as well.

So, from this point of view a system is simply something that makes sense to people.

Some systems exist – like the ecosystem.

But we humans also take action in these systems – purposeful action – we want to do something for a reason.

And so we have human activity systems that are “sets of purposeful human activities”.

Or in simpler language it’s a list of things we do connected so they have some kind of order to them.

And we can show that with nodes and links, things to do and the connections between them.

It’s possible that everything can be represented in this way.

Now, why does this matter?

And if you’re honest with yourself and you’ve managed to read this far, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone cares.

But let me carry on.

If you want to do something you often make a list of things to do.

Sometimes, if you’ve had some training you’ll set out a process, steps to do in order.

Both these things can be checked off and stepped through.

An activity model is sort of the same thing but instead of being a “time” based thing it’s a “doing” based thing.

It’s a plain English description of what needs to be done.

And the keen eyed among you will have noticed I’ve switched terms here.

The “human activity system” has a lot of baggage – it requires an understanding of systems theory, an acceptance of multiple points of view and an agreement that a model is simply a particular representation of what humans do.

An activity model, in my mind, is what needs to be done.

That seems simpler.

Now, I’m going to try and work this into some kind of argument that has a place in a thesis.

I am not feeling particularly confident…

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh