Category: Management

Thursday, 6.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this. – Miyamoto Musashi

In a police investigation, I understand, the most important thing is the timeline of events.

What happened first? What happened next? And so on.

It’s useful to keep this in mind because, although we sort of know time happens in this sequential kind of way we sometimes forget.

Actually, it’s probably fair to say we often forget.

And that probably has something to do with how our brains work.

For example, I read something on social media today that has a line that looked like “Why is no one talking about … thing?”

And someone responded, agreeing that no one was talking about it, and pointing to a report on the issue.

So, someone is talking about it – just because it’s news to you doesn’t mean that somewhere else there’s an army of people working on the subject.

When we first become aware of something our brain adjusts its filter, now showing you everything that’s similar – the so called reticular activating system.

It’s when you decide you want a new car you see models of the ones you’re considering everywhere you look.

Now, let’s turn this the other way around – what if you have a message you want to get out there.

Is the right time to send out that message when you’ve written it?

That’s what many of us do – we do stuff and send it out.

This post, for example, will come to your inbox in a short while when I press the right button.

And that’s fine if your focus is on creating material – that’s what I’m trying to do.

But you need to think differently when you want someone to react to your stuff – to respond to what you do.

If you want that to happen you first need to work out what their timeline looks like.

Let’s say you sell a cost reduction service.

When is the best time to get in touch with a person at a prospect organisation?

First, obviously, you need to figure out who the best person is to get in touch with – is it the Managing Director, a plant operator?

Who is the person or group of people with the responsibility and the power to commission your services?

If it’s the MD, do you work down a list of companies from A-Z, highest to lowest turnover?

Bash the phones or send spam email and hope you get through?

Or can you be more strategic about it all?

What if you look at companies and see how their results look year on year – which ones are under pressure to do something?

What if you look at companies where a new MD has taken over – someone who wants to make their mark quickly?

What about companies that have negative reviews and are struggling to manage the impact on their reputation?

All these organisations may be willing to listen to your message about how you can take out costs because of what you know.

There are many reasons why you might be rejected by someone – and it often has to do with when you’ve approached them.

If you adopt a random approach then you will have a certain success rate – because for a proportion of the people you talk to you’ll get the timing right.

The question for you is whether by looking more closely at the timeline of events you can figure out which entry point will increase your chances of success.

But that information isn’t just out there – it’s not easy to find.

It takes some detective work.

You have to get into the minds of your prospects – the way they act and think.

Maybe you interview them, maybe you gather research, maybe you set up google alerts for significant events.

You create a research division – even if it’s just you – your own private investigative office to support your marketing efforts.

You know how in stories the detective gets the bad guys by piecing together bits of evidence that are there for everyone to see – but only the detective put together.

That’s the skill we need to develop as marketers.

Because you can get your timing right by accident.

But if you understand the way the timeline works, you can get it right on purpose.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 8.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains. – Charles Darwin

In one of David Attenborough’s programmes there is an arresting scene of two bulls, a challenger and an old veteran, going head to head.

Weighing over half a ton each, their foreheads crash together, again and again.

The challenger seems to be winning until the veteran gets broadside and drives him away.

It’s the kind of clash you remember, that sticks in your mind – because of the beauty and majesty of these animals and the seeming pointlessness of their way of setting a dispute.

But then you have to ask yourself, what alternatives do you have?

In a post on Ben Orlin’s very funny Math With Bad Drawings blog he explains the Intermediate Value Theorem as effectively saying that if at one time you were three feet tall and then at a later time you were five, then at some time in between you must have been four feet tall.

Now, what this means for you and me is that evolution and maths are telling us that what we see is not all there is.

Let me explain.

If you have a job right now, in order to start that job you signed a contract.

A contract that sets out the rights and obligations between you and your employer.

Maybe it’s a very restrictive one, where they own everything you make, even what you come up with while you’re dreaming.

Maybe it’s one where they can fire you at any time.

Or maybe there isn’t one at all – it’s cash in hand, or sometimes it’s not.

Or it’s a loose contract setting out what you will do for this employer but leaving room for you to work for other as well.

Those of us that aren’t lawyers tend to look at contracts as perfect documents, set in stone – while to lawyers they might simply be a set of statements, often imperfect, and something to argue over and settle after they’ve been paid.

An approach to management might have evolved along similar lines, from forced labour to a postmodern network of capabilities – each approach fitting into a particular niche, surviving, evolving, dying.

What’s obvious is what is in front of you – the end products of all those small changes, those intermediate states.

We see them as they are now – bulls, markets, societies, economies, theories – and wonder how they ever got so big and complex – surely it cannot have been by chance?

There must have been a guiding hand, a creator, someone omnipotent?

But somehow, the more plausible explanation is that these things just happened over time.

And they took time.

Which human beings don’t like – I saw a post where Paul Graham quoted some as always asking if you think something will take ten years ask yourself how you will do it in six months.

Maybe some things can be addressed that way.

Others can’t.

You can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant, for example.

If you want to become good at something – playing music, writing, programming, managing, science, learning a language, assimilating into a society – it’s hard to shortcut those 10,000 hours or 10 years that you usually need.

But most of that applies to things that you want to do – like those bulls who want to protect their territory – or take over another one’s patch.

For human beings we have the advantage of being able to consider what to do.

We can see how those bulls resolve their differences and understand that it involves pain and a lingering headache.

And we can choose to do things differently – change the things we don’t like.

As long as we don’t get fooled into thinking that change is not possible – that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Because you can make a difference.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.13pm

Sheffield, U.K

And Pharoah said, ‘You are lazy! You will be given no straw, but you must produce the same tally of bricks each day.’ – Exodus 5

Do you know how to find out what people will do in a given situation?

For example, if you’re marketing a new brand of healthy cereal, what questions would you ask to find out whether people will buy it?

Many people will assume the right thing to do is ask people what they will do.

“Would buy this type of cereal?”, might be one.

A simple direct question – would you do this.

Many people, when asked such a question, will probably say that they would buy that type of healthy cereal.

Should you now go and build your factories – start producing tons of the stuff?

Before you do that the question you should ask is “What types of cereal do you buy now?”

The point is that studying the past will tell often you more about what will happen in the future than any amount of prediction or forecasting.

Why is that?

Well, the future has an infinite set of alternatives – every possible thing that could happen from the next instant.

The past is defined – a single timeline of things that have happened.

The past is certain and the future uncertain.

But what is likely is that things that have happened in the past will happen again in the future.

If your preference has been for chocolate ice cream for most of your adult life you are unlikely to change to a pomegranate fusion.

This is the time of year for resolutions – for ideas and plans for how you will do things differently.

Imagine you were to tell a friend about how you have spent the last few days, the last few weeks, the last few months, the last year – what would you say?

If you could talk through what’s taken your time, what you’ve enjoyed doing, how things have gone – then you will have an insight into what you’ve done.

And in what you’ve done lies the information you need to understand what you’re going to do.

Let’s take writing as an example – something like keeping a blog like this one you’re reading.

If I look back at what I’ve done, the one constant that’s always been there is writing.

I have sheets of yellow paper with pencilled writing from 1998 in a file, letters, diary entries – not everything but enough to know that writing has been something I’ve done for a few decades.

I use writing as a way to examine what I think, as a way to understand other people’s ideas, as a way to work through unsettling situations.

In the first decade of this century I held a view that if something wasn’t in writing it practically didn’t exist.

In the second decade I revised that view to if something isn’t on the Internet it doesn’t exist.

Now, if someone starts a website or a blog or whatever else because they think it would be a useful thing to do – something utilitarian – perhaps something as part of a content marketing strategy – the test of whether they will keep at it is whether they have written much in the past.

Because if they haven’t this task will wear them down, doing something they don’t really like doing day after day.

And you can’t outsource it easily – because that person writing has the same problem.

Do they do it because they have to – in which case that angst will show – or do they do it because they like writing?

The thing you have to look for when trying to see whether something that you want to change is likely to do so is the voice of the process.

If you want to increase the number of customers you have, how much time did you spend last year having conversations with prospects, partners and introducers?

If you want to lose weight how many days a week did you exercise last year?

If you want to spend less how much time did you spend last year filling in your cashbook and updating your budget?

The fact is that we are all anchored in the past, rooted there – just like a giant tree.

If we want to change ourselves or our situation in a way that is very different from where we are now we need to pull up that anchor, uproot that tree – and that’s very hard work.

Not impossible – but very hard.

You should have started taking baby steps to change ten years ago.

But if you haven’t – today is good too.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy. – John Lithgow

I said I probably wouldn’t write about the fourth chapter of Alain de Botton’s book The consolations of philosophy but I’ve changed my mind.

The reason I thought I’d skip it is because it covers areas that are not nice to read about as part of an essay on inadequacy.

The problem is one of how people in history have treated other people because they were different – lesser than them.

And it’s happened all over the world, all across time – from South America to Africa to Europe and Asia and Australasia.

The scars of these histories are still visible today – just pick a country – it seems unfair to single out one and there will be something in their history people now wish was simply forgotten.

The good thing is that it now is unlikely that such things will be forgotten – the Internet has a long memory and gives people a voice when they did not have one.

Some of those stories are ones you may not wish to hear.

Right now, for example, with young children and knowing what we now know- I am unable to pick up a book in the library that has letters that Jewish children living in ghettos wrote during the war.

I know it’s there, and must be read – but later.

But my reason for writing about this chapter is that it introduces a French philosopher, Montaigne, who wrote about how important it was that we understand one another.

It is easy to see anything different as worse – and that is how people have seen things for most of history.

In some ways that is a natural, instinctive way to look at the world.

It’s natural and instinctive to see your country being filled up with foreigners and feeling like you’re being pushed out.

And that’s why it’s wrong.

If you want to be a “good” person they you have to fight against what is your natural and instinctive reaction to things – a reaction based on what you think is normal and abnormal based on what you have learned and been exposed to.

And Montaigne pointed out that they only way you can do that is by learning more about other people, other cultures and other ways of doing things.

In any situation you will have some people that are in charge, in control, this is their space.

And you will have others that try to fit in – but feel small, marginalised, without a voice, facing a glass ceiling or outright antagonism and violence.

Who feel inadequate.

And this happens to individuals as well – the inadequacy that affects us when we see people living perfect lives on social media – when we see others that seem to be doing much better than we are.

Montaigne points out that respect or value seems to come from people who are furthest away from you.

To your family you are an eccentric – while to someone on the other side of the world your words might be life changing.

Now one solution to the inequity in life and society is for the majority, the winners to make place for the minority, the marginalised.

Some places do this – and some places fight it and depending on where you live – you take the opportunity or you live with the injustice.

But if you are lucky you have something now that almost no one had in the past.

You have the ability to get a voice – a global one.

And one can hope that when we hear these voices we will be more open to change.

Let’s be real about this – you will have some people build walls and ignore the evidence – fight against any suggestion that they or their ancestors did anything wrong.

And you will have others that accept what happened and try to make a difference.

For example, this article analyses Japan’s history and suggests that what is needed in such situations is a permanent way of memorialising and apologising for national crimes – in law, in education, and in culture.

But while you’re waiting being able to tell your story is one way of dealing with what has happened.

What we should be doing is teaching people the right way to treat others.

You’ve all heard of the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

What’s actually needed, but less well known, is the platinum rule.

“Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.23pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease. – George Steiner

I’m on the third chapter of Alain de Botton’s The consolations of philosophy and this is about frustration.

The basic problem with life is that every once a while what we wish for is blocked by reality.

You really wanted that promotion, but someone else got it.

Or you wanted to get those tickets but they were sold out.

When this kind of stuff happens some people get angry.

It’s a natural response to being frustrated, they argue. If you don’t respond like that then you’re emotionally shut down – not in touch with your feelings – a robot.

de Botton draws on the Roman philosopher Seneca whose advice pretty much comes down to shit happens – so expect it to happen and then you won’t be surprised when it does happen.

Bad things can happen – in fact every bad thing that could happen to you could happen pretty much in the next minute.

So, prepare yourself and be ready for whatever might happen.

And then you won’t feel so bad?

Hmmm. Not sure about that last bit.

Seneca went through his share of troubles – he was exiled, brought back and finally ordered to kill himself by his former student, the Emperor Nero – and he did so – without falling apart.

The thing is, when you look at Seneca’s approach to dealing with frustration it really only applies to things that frustrate you – things that affect only you.

If you’re passed over, if you’re swindled out of a commission, if people use you and then discard you – then yes you can choose to be stoic and calm about it all.

But then there are times when you can be calm and very angry at the same time.

And those times are when, I suppose, you are in a situation where other people have absolute power over you and your family and your people.

The next chapter of de Botton’s book, which I think I will skip writing about, talks about what happened to the Native American population in the 1500s.

They were seen as non-human by the invading Spanish – and butchered and treated worse than animals – 70 million died out of a population of 80 million.

This might seem like a long time ago – but you have to then remember the history of slavery a few hundred years later.

And the guillotine and the inquisition were still there in the East in the last century.

Should the Indians and the slaves have just taken this stoically – accepted that bad things happen to them and their families and got on with living – or more often, dying?

How would you react?

But then, coming back to something approaching normality – you have frustrations that can be overcome – like building a bridge or inventing new things.

Being too stoic and accepting of everything might also mean that you never grow or learn or push yourself.

So, perhaps here’s a conclusion from the essay.

Most things are small things – don’t sweat the small stuff.

Many things can be overcome – don’t give up too soon.

But what’s not in the essay is when frustration should be absorbed and used and redirected.

Sometimes you should work to make change happen – and anger can drive you to do that – especially when things are unfair.

And sometimes you should go with the flow – accept reality and live the best you can.

As always – the approach you take depends on the situation you’re in.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 7.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

And this was known as that greatest of treasures, which is Hope. It was a good way of getting poorer really very quickly, and staying poor. It could be you, but it wouldn’t be – Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

It’s that time of year when we’re almost at the end – and we start thinking about how we’re going to do things differently.

After a short period of doing nothing, that is, other than reading and watching TV – which is where you pick up a few interesting insights.

Take Terry Pratchett’s book “Going Postal”, for example.

It’s a story about a con man and his sometimes involuntary journey towards redemption, and along the way we could learn something about human nature and management.

Pratchett clearly has a history there, given his first story published when he was 13 is called “Business Rivals” and he spent time in the Central Electricity Generating Board.

One thing you should really take away from the book is that you need to make it easy for people to give you money.

In the book you have a man who figures that you might as well go for the impossible – because if you do achieve it you’re a hero and if you don’t – well it was impossible anyway.

You don’t get marks for reaching for something safe and not making it – people don’t notice that happening.

So what should you do and when?

That’s where the TV series “Patriot” comes in and especially the episode on the Vantasner Danger Meridian.

The Vantasner Danger Meridian is defined as “the point or line after which danger to your mission and/or sense of self increases exponentially. Often used to demarcate conditions of grave and approaching danger.”

It doesn’t exist in real life – but it should.

Here’s why.

We all know about the Sunk Cost Fallacy – you might have spent lots of time and money into a particular idea or cause but that shouldn’t be taken into consideration when deciding what to do next.

You should make that decision based on the facts you have now – not what you did previously.

Which is where we are all right now.

You have have spent decades building up a career, or failing to build one.

You might have spent lots of money on a project that isn’t working out the way you might like.

So, should you walk away because things don’t look good?

The Sunk Cost Fallacy would have you do just that – and that’s probably a fallacy in itself.

The difficulty is that we don’t know – we can’t know the best thing to do.

Endless possibilities unfold in front of us – it’s only when we make a decision that some disappear and others appear.

So what really matters is not the right decision but the next decision.

And this is where something like the VDM should really exist in real life.

Given where you are now what are the next things you can do?

And which of those do you want to do?

And where is the line – where is the point where danger increases exponentially.

Let’s take an example – it’s the New Year and you think it’s a good idea to start it by chucking in your job.

For many people that creates a number of dangerous scenarios.

Where is your money going to come from, how will you pay the mortgage, where is the next job, do you have clients lined up if you’re going to go independent?

That’s probably well past the VDM

What we need to do is figure out where the line is and how close we can get to it without things going bad.

And that needs us to be conscious of another introduction in the plot – that of jellyfish.

Apparently if you cut a jellyfish in two, the pieces can regenerate and form two new jellyfish.

The analogy here is that if you screw up a situation then that results in more things to deal with – lies beget more lies and so on.

And pretty soon the number of things you have to handle grows more quickly than you can handle them – and things start to go wrong.

When you pull all this together and combine Pratchett’s observations and the Patriot’s script you are left with something like this.

Hope is not a strategy.

Wishes are for wells.

If you want to change things the challenge is figuring out what you can do in the situation you’re in without crossing a line where danger increases exponentially.

When you’re on the right side of that line you can try and experiment and innovate.

On the wrong side of that line lies panic and desperation.

And at the edge – the edge between Newtonian physics and chaos lies complexity.

Which is where change emerges.

And if you’re lucky, it’s the change you want.

Happy New Year.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh