Monday, 10.49pm
Sheffield, U.K.
When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder. – James H. Boren
I’ve been thinking about James Thurber today, the American writer and cartoonist.
He had a drawing style that was loose and fluid, and captured the essence of a scene in a few scrawled lines.
One of his books is called “The last flower: A parable in pictures” apparently his favourite.
It’s a story about war. About how it happens, how people change, how it makes things worse, how people make things better, and how war comes around again.
We seem to be living through a time with more wars, with more parts of the world affected by conflict.
Operations Research, the field I’m interested, was born out of wartime work.
Early work was about working out things like the trajectories of shells.
Our modern high tech economy is arguably the result of the military-industrial complex, and it’s support for better spears to fight with.
It’s all a little depressing.
Human beings develop new technologies to stay ahead, to be better equipped than others to survive.
It’s an evolutionary trait.
Failing to participate is preparing to go extinct.
At an individual, organisational, or national level we need to organise ourselves for survival.
First survive, then climb the pyramid – see how far you can get to being an apex predator.
That’s what superpowers aim to be.
I guess an argument could be made that what we do at work is try and survive the day.
And we try to do that by figuring out what the boss wants.
Everyone has a boss. Someone you answer to, someone that needs what you provide.
Your customer is your boss too.
You’ve got to try and keep them happy.
But the trick to doing that is to ask a next level question – what does your boss’s boss want?
That’s the thing you need to figure out and deliver if you want to get your work done and go home.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 