Author: Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.54pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The ‘U’ goes before ‘ME’ in Customer. – Janna Cachola

How many businesses can you think of that are pure product plays now?

Natural resources and commodities perhaps.

And of course all the factories pumping out things from shampoo to chocolate.

But many businesses depend on a combination of products and services and when you’re selling to someone else they might be buying your product but they’re taking your service into account as well.

Which makes it useful to study exactly what’s going on when you try and pitch your product or service to someone else.

If you make a box, for example, you could find a prospect and show off your box.

Your prospect is probably stood there with folded arms – she probably already as a box supplier and doesn’t really see what you do differently.

If your box is a service, like management consulting it’s harder to see the point of what you do.

Either she believes she doesn’t need you or already has a provider.

The mistake most people make is to focus on the features and benefits of what they’re offering.

Asked why they’re different – what’s their Unique Selling Point – they talk about their people, how nice they are and how good their product is.

Faced with objections they go on the offensive – ready to “handle” them, brush them aside, tear them down or climb over them.

And that’s irritating – like when someone uses the strategy of agreeing with everything you say so that they can then repeat what they just told you.

So that’s where a model like the one above, based on the one in Soft systems methodology in action, written by Peter Checkland and Jim Scholes, comes in.

Checkland and Scholes quote Richard Norman who says that the question is not “Who is my customer” but “Who is my customer’s customer”.

If you are the service provider, A, and you are trying to sell to the service recipient, B, and you focus on the transaction between A and B – there you are product in hand facing a reluctant and irritated counterpart.

Yes you could argue that they shouldn’t be like that – that they should be open to salespeople because that’s how they are introduced to opportunities – but people are people and if they don’t like being cold-called you’re not going to change their minds.

However people who don’t like being sold to open up and become much more interested when they talk about how to serve their customers better. Let’s call those folk C.

The transaction between B and C is of vital interest to B. That’s something that matters and anything that makes it better is worth considering.

So, if you want to sell B your service you need to figure out how best you can help B add value to C.

That’s your focus zone.

Now this seems, like the authors say in the book, a simple and obvious model.

But just think back of the number of times you’ve been in conversations where the focus was about A and B and C wasn’t mentioned at all.

The fact is that if you want your service to be considered your attention and the time you have with B needs to be spent on the focus zone – where you think about how the two of you (A and B) can add value to the transaction between B and C.

If you can really add value then you will find B open to the prospect of sharing value with you.

And be warned, value is not always easy to find.

Technological solutions that cut costs for B, for example, rarely raise margins. Instead the savings are passed through to C in the form of lower prices.

Good value, sustainable value comes from adding something more magical – by creating competitive advantage for B and C in some way.

But what is sustainable competitive advantage?

Well… ideas for that are going to come out of your discussions as you explore the focus zone.

But here’s a suggestion – prioritise ideas that are inimitable – hard to copy.

Because that can often be the secret to advantage – doing something no one else can.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another. – Napoleon Hill

There are two ways to deal with the world: scientists try to explain it and artists try to see the value in it.

In other words, scientists try and interpret it while artists try and appreciate it.

But why is that? Is it just natural to look at things that way or is there some reason why artists resist explanations and scientists resist any attempt at being less than completely objective and value free.

These types of questions led David Cooperrider to look again at how organisations functioned and suggest that you could stop thinking in terms of solving problems and more in terms of appreciating mysteries – something he called Appreciative Inquiry.

In other words, stop trying to solve your problem. Instead, appreciate the nature of your situation.

This attempt to reframe the discussion apparently did not go down well.

And one reason for that is the way we react to suggestions – the way in which we react to words.

Before we look at what that means we need to remind ourselves that the things we see in the world didn’t come into existence fully formed and perfect.

Although you now see institutions everywhere – companies, courts and senate halls among them – there was a time when they didn’t exist.

It’s easy to see this if you’ve ever tried to arrange a trip with friends or planned a startup.

The trip or the startup didn’t exist before you started that first conversation with your friends.

The words you spoke to each other, the shared meaning you created and the agreements you made resulted in creating the trip or startup that then emerged.

In essence, the words you spoke had real power – although simply vibrations in air they caused something new to come into existence.

This way of thinking about things is a social constructionist approach – the idea that the world around us is created from the conversations we have.

And that makes the words you say important.

Very important.

This can be hard for someone like me, who believes themselves to be rational and relatively unaffected by the emotional content of words, to appreciate.

But you can see the impact of words every day – probably every time you have a conversation at work or with friends.

Let’s say you want to start a business – a new agency.

There will be people who will be negative about the whole thing. They’ll tell you it’s a bad idea and list all the things that could go wrong, believing that they are being helpful.

Or perhaps you want to marry someone from a different religion.

Your family may simply say No! Not if you want to remain a part of their family.

There are those people who find problems everywhere they look.

They may agree that things should improve, we should take action but here are the reasons why it needs to be thought through or slowed down or checked over.

These are people who like committees – where good ideas go to die.

Then you have people who are both helpful and positive, people who say yes, and give you more suggestions on what you could do and how you could avoid risks.

Some people believe that what needs to happen is that problems need to be solved – we need to find out what’s wrong and what needs to be done to fix things.

The appreciative inquiry approach tries to use a different approach – a positive one that uses questions and stories to look towards a better future.

Although, it isn’t just supposed to be a way to go to your happy place.

Appreciation is about seeing the whole for what it is, warts and all.

Seeing the beauty of what is as well as noticing the cracks that mar its surface – and then taking steps to touch up or improve its appearance.

But the secret is that the way to creating that new future starts not with decisions, resources or actions.

It starts with words.

And it’s limited only by what you agree to do together.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. – Yogi Berra

I learned a new word today – praxis.

It has a long history – back to Aristotle, it seems.

Aristotle said the work we do results in theory, produces something or is practical.

The reason they are different has to do with the why question – why do we do each type of work?

What’s the purpose behind each one?

If you study maths, say something like number theory, you do it for the sake of the knowledge itself.

For example, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan once explained that the number 1,729 was a very interesting one.

It’s the smallest number you can get to by adding two cubes in two different ways.

Now – you’d want to know that really only for the sake of knowing it.

Although, number theory turned out to have quite a few applications later on – at the time mathematicians like Ramanujan were interested in it really because it was interesting to them – and that was all there was to it.

They’re the folk, I suppose, that contemplate on top of a mountain, and think their way to truth.

At the foothills, you find another sort of folk – productive ones.

People who work close to the earth – making things.

They use techniques – methods that result in something predictable.

Like pots, or washing machines or asphalt.

But then there’s another sort of person – the type Aristotle calls practical, which sounds quite similar to productive but is not the same thing.

The productive person knows what the end goal is.

The practical person doesn’t.

Instead, they face situations – situations where there is no clear answer, no one true way.

They have to use judgement and thought and feel and the kinds of things that aren’t easily expressed clearly as a theory or as a technique.

One way to think of it is as an oscillation, or more visually, a route march from theory to practice and back again.

For example, you might start a new job in a fast growing company.

Experience the joys and stresses of the early days.

And the predictability, higher income and maddening bureaucracy in later years.

All these are experiences that you get while doing productive work.

But do you know why you feel good or bad?

Why you like your job or hate it?

There are simplistic explanations – like most poople leave bosses, not jobs.

And that what’s going on is institutional discrimination.

But then if you get a chance to actually study the theory – you might be introduced to the concept of modern and post-modern organisations – and that gives you a way to understand your experience and perhaps look at it differently.

Something new happens when you use theory to understand what you’ve experienced.

Or when you try and apply theory to improve the situation you are in.

And in turn, use the experience you get by applying theory to look back and improve the theory itself.

That kind of activity is praxis – the journey between theory and practice – the mixing of the two until there is no start or end, just the journey.

And if you want to make a real difference – especially when it comes to important situations – for you personally or for society as a whole – praxis is the way to go.

There’s a reason why theory for theory’s sake is confined in ivory towers.

And a reason why just focusing on the bottom line or the method or the engineering is not enough to solve complex societal issues.

What we need is practical action informed by theory.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh