Blog

Wednesday, 10.27pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man. – James Thurber

I stumbled over James Thurber again today.

I remember reading him as a child, remember the humour and pictures and laughing.

And then three decades seem to have passed.

So, I went back and looked at some of his work, starting with The beast in me and other animals.

This time, I’ve been looking at the drawings – his way of capturing what is going on around him, and what goes on in between the lines – in between what is obvious.

I gravitated towards the drawings because they seem to capture something that few other things seem to do – an essence that is lost in other forms of media.

For example, all parents take millions of pictures of their children.

But the images I remember are the sketches I dashed off as I watched mine play near a river or draw during a train journey.

They are not good drawings – they lack any pretence at being art.

They are doodles, dashed off in the moment, but they capture a memory differently than a photograph – which retains every detail but that which matters.

So, it’s reassuring to learn that Thurber took a similar approach to his drawings as well – despite being featured on the New Yorker and around the world they were dashed off in minutes and somehow drastically reduce complexity to comedic brilliance.

And observation – of the small things that make up our world today.

I tried to do a Thurberesque sketch of a scene we see all too often these days – a child with a device and other children gravitating towards it.

We see this more and more as children (and adults) consume content – while once we might have had them creating it, sat on the floor drawing and doodling instead.

Which makes me wonder – if children grow up too quickly – too aware of perfect images before they have time to doodle – then what happens to their ability to create?

The thing that Thurber did was observe – look around and see humour and contradiction in everyday life.

It’s not perfect.

But it can be amusing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 7.02pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis – William Osler

I was talking about the state of medicine today with someone who should know – and learned that there is a serious problem with training new doctors in the developing world.

Privatisation of teaching inevitably results in the standard of teaching going down – as the superstars migrate to the highest paid and most prestigious roles and the rest staff the other places.

Doctors don’t know the basics – how to take a patient history, how to present their findings and how to do the things that doctors should learn to do.

The fact is that there are things that can be trained easily and there are things that can’t – like a good bedside manner.

And all this has been known for a long time.

William Osler came up with the idea of a medical residency – and the idea that students should see and talk to patients.

An essay of his titled Books and Men has this line:

“To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”

The first point we should take from this is that it’s not enough to read about things – we must practice as well in real life situations.

If you’re a writer, an artist, a salesperson, a consultant, a photographer – you will learn much by reading about it and you will learn much by doing it.

Doing both will make you brilliant at what you do.

Doing either one on its own will not.

Good, perhaps, but not exceptional.

Of course, you have to learn how to learn – and Osler has something to say on that, quoting an old writer who says there are four sorts of readers.

Sponges who soak up everything without asking or checking; Hour glasses that get knowledge and pour it out just as quickly; bags, that retain the dregs and let the wine escape and sieves that keep only the best.

Strive to be a sieve – it takes longer than you think.

And then there is the quote that starts this blog – which tells you all you need to know about the skill you need to have.

Too many people, many doctors don’t listen.

They look at the symptoms and make a diagnosis.

They sweep in, look at the person, the situation – and say what they think.

It’s something you see all the time – with managers, executives, partners – anyone in a position of authority.

What they want to do is get to the solution – and of course it’s the solution they have in mind.

People like that are very confident – they’ve been successful – that’s why they’re in charge.

Successful anyway in the sense that what they did or didn’t do can’t be measured and the people judging them had no idea what was really going on.

And the thing about people like that is they don’t want to listen – they might politely give you the impression they are but really they’re thinking about something else and will, as soon as they can, squish you and anyone else that’s in their way.

What such people don’t do is listen.

They don’t take a patient history – a situation history.

They don’t ask what has been going on, what’s the background, what’s the context – what led up to the events that are being considered.

And this is what you find when you listen.

The answer is in front of you every time – one answer anyway that fits the facts that you’ve now taken the time to gather.

It’s just sitting there hidden in plain view – and what you needed to make it visible is get people talking – and just listen.

And then, when you’ve listened, you can add your professional opinion.

You will now know what to name the problem, the disease, the condition.

You will know how to test for it, how to measure it, how to detect it.

And you will know what to prescribe, how to fix it, how to solve it.

It doesn’t matter what you do or how you help other people.

But you will do it better if you first learn to listen.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

p.s. If you want to learn more about how I do this professionally, here is a paper I wrote today that sets it out in more detail.

Friday, 7.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We are the only species on Earth that observe “Shark Week”. Sharks don’t even observe “Shark Week”, but we do. For the same reason I can pick this pencil, tell you its name is Steve and go like this (breaks pencil) and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside, because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an academy award for Screenwriting. – Jeff Winger in Community

A few things haven’t gone the way I would have liked today.

I don’t usually worry much about things not going right – but when they don’t it’s still stings a little.

It will pass – it always does.

But, it gets me thinking about a few things – but I don’t know if the pieces will come together in any coherent way.

But let us have a go.

We start with a book called Bureaucracy: What government organisations do and why they do it by James Q. Wilson.

Wilson makes an unpromising start by quoting James G. March and Herbert A. Simon as writing that “not a great deal has been said about organizations, but it has been said over and over in a variety of languages.”

Theory, this implies, is a waste of time but it is unlikely to be of any practical use.

Well – that’s it for this blog then.

Luckily, there is more, and it is useful.

First, there is a distillation of concepts one can use to understand bureaucracies – and organisations in general.

Ask yourself what tasks the organisation does – not goals, but the critical tasks it must carry out.

Then ask what gives the organisation its sense of mission – is it pride in what people do, a religious calling, a sense of honour and duty?

And then ask how autonomous the organisation is – how well it can make decisions.

Then, if we skip to the end Wilson quotes James Colvard on how to run organisations better – have “a bias towards action, small staffs, and a high level of delegation based on trust.”

And here we get to a central point – management is not about tools and it is not about systems.

It is about delivering something – a mission – what a customer needs – something that makes things better.

From this, we can jump to Federalist Paper No. 51 which has some hope for people wondering what is happening in the world right now – especially when it comes to people and governments.

James Madison argues, in his paper that:

“The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

In other words you need institutions – independent centres of power that balance and check each other to maintain freedom and democracy in a society.

And you need the same in an organisation – excessive centralisation leads to ossification, excessive decentralisation leads to dissipation – and you need a balance of loose and tight to keep the system together.

So, what about the broken pencil?

The point, I suppose, is that organisations act in ways that don’t always make sense.

What wins in one situation loses in another – and we often make the mistake of thinking that it’s the systems and processes that are the organisation rather than the people.

But the people are also the system.

As humans we can connect to anything – we can take a bunch of shapes, add facial features and emotions and give them personalities and feel like we relate to them in some way.

And as humans we are impossibly complex.

Something that seems right to one person is completely wrong to another.

When I fail, it is often less because what I did was a failure but because what I did was wrong in the eyes of others.

Or maybe it was just wrong – it’s hard to tell.

But the thing is to keep going – because what else is there to do?

We have the ability, it seems, to project human nature onto everything around us.

When we understand our own – then perhaps we will find the right place for us.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.” – Bill Waterson

It’s not often when some of my favourite concepts find themselves travelling towards each other and, unlike physical objects that find it hard to occupy the same space at the same time, combine to create something greater – something more lasting.

Let me explain.

If you are familiar with Bill Waterson’s cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes – the boy with the tiger – you may remember that he once invented a transmogrifier – something that would change you into something else.

Later, he modified the transmogrifier, turning it on its side creating a duplicator – where you could make copies of anything.

The one in the image above is the perfected version…

A duplicator, coincidentally, is the subject of a story that Neil Gaiman remembers in his book The view from the cheap seats – a story that changed how he looked at things.

And it has to do with theft.

When someone steals from you they take something you have, something you can’t get back.

Like your watch or some gold or a car.

But when you steal music or a book or a movie, Gaiman points out, it’s something different – what you’re doing is using a duplicator – making a copy.

In doing that the original hasn’t been taken, but an exact copy has.

What this means for creators is that the value of stuff that can be duplicated is going to go down.

If you create a song now you sell it for less than a dollar.

Books are cheap – not many people can get away with selling books that have a three figure price tag.

The entire industry that goes into policing intellectual property – making sure that copies are not passed around may keep prices high but reduces value as well due to the cost of policing.

In this new world the things that will hold and gain in value are the things that cannot be reproduced.

Gaiman suggests these are things like live shows and personal contact.

And we’re all probably finding that to be the case – which is why events and get-togethers are one of the fastest growing segments of society and activity.

Gaiman then talks about his friend Cory Doctorow who has an analogy about mammals and dandelions that starts to explain this changing world.

Mammals invest a huge amount of time protecting and nurturing their young.

Dandelions let their seeds drift away with the wind and don’t worry about which ones make it or not.

People who treat their intellectual property like mammals treat their young – protective and nurturing to ensure their profits will find the whole thing pretty hard going and pretty depressing.

The thing for creators now is to create – that’s the first thing.

As the quote that starts this post suggests find something you like doing and then go about doing it.

Don’t worry about profits and protection and property – such things are from the old days.

Just create and set your creations free to drift with the wind – fly along the Internet.

And find things to do to help you make a living that are hard to duplicate – consulting, events, support, maintenance – the kinds of things that will pay for food and shelter and some luxuries.

Because the thing is you might find that the duplicator works for you and the things you do that are hard to duplicate work for you.

The only question is when?

Until then, hang around creating stuff you enjoy making.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.19pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad. – Howard Luck Gossage

Like most of you, I suspect, I’ve tried writing a blog at various points – and most of them fell by the wayside.

I drew the picture above for one of these attempts in April 2016 to talk about The Man in the Chair.

In 1958 McGraw-Hill, a publisher of business titles, came up with an ad – The Man in the Chair – which then ran for the next three or four decades.

The point of the ad was that a buyer knows almost nothing about you when they first become aware of you – so why do you think they should buy from you?

Now, you probably don’t think that – but it’s a lesson many of us learn over time, often too late.

For example, when you send off your CV for a job do you assume that everything the reviewer needs to know is in there?

Do you not mention something when you’re talking to someone because you assume they must already know?

Most people are much less informed about you, your product or your service than you might think.

I was browsing through Great advertising campaigns by Nicholas Ind, and he points out in the book that it’s easy for those involved with a brand – those who spend much of their time thinking and working and trying to figure out how to tell others about their brand – to assume that it’s just as important to the consumer.

In reality, it’s probably inconsequential – or at least nowhere near as important as you think it might be.

For example in the utility industries – those dealing with electricity, gas, water and telecoms – there is a huge amount of complexity.

There is regulation, change, investment, billing – all kinds of arcane things that keep people employed.

Most consumers, however, are interested in two things at most.

Do they have to do something – are they obliged to comply?

What does it mean for their budgets?

Other than that they want you to sort out all the complexity.

So, at the sharp end, the bit that points at the consumer you need a very simple message.

In the book Nicholas tells you about Absolut Vodka – how Geoff Hayes, an Art Director, came up with the idea of showing the vodka bottle with words like “It’s absolutely perfect.”

His writer pointed out that you could trim that to “Absolut Perfection.”

Two words – and it captures something.

But, the book points out, is that the reason the team thought they had something was because from those two words they had ten ideas for how to present things – which is what made it a campaign.

It takes time to get a sense of what something is – what it means.

And even if that something is you – you might find that it takes time to figure that out – and it takes time to figure out what your business is all about.

And it’s probably worth remembering that if it takes us so long to work it out – it must be even harder for someone else.

The mistake we make is trying to sell – to close – too early in the process.

What we really need to learn when trying to advertise is that, as the McGraw-Hill ad says, “sales start before your salesman calls.”

So design your advertising to help your customer get to know you in a way that works for them.

And then the sales seem to just happen.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh