Category: Management

Sunday, 6.52pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The poet strips naked. The philosopher takes notes. – Marty Rubin

How open and transparent should you be is a contingent question – it depends on where you are right now.

If you are a large corporate then having friends in the right places and laws that protect your business are perhaps more important.

If you are new and fresh then showing everyone why you are different might be what matters.

What’s interesting is the range of views you get from different people – a range you can see in a sampling of quotes.

Many politicians say they believe in being transparent – which might get a laugh or two from the masses.

A lot of people say transparency is absolutely good – perhaps they are the poets Rubin talks about in the quote above.

But then you have a rejoinder like this one from J. Richard Singleton, “The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer.”

Harsh.

Plausible?

How open should you be, for example, when it comes to negotiating a pay rise?

Should you be open about how much you need the money? About how much of a struggle it is to meet your bills?

Or should you be open about the work you put in – or don’t put in because of the obstacles in your way?

What if you make a mistake on a client’s account – how do you handle that?

Do you tell the client everything that’s happened or do you try and manage the impact it has on them?

The thing that led me to think about this question has to do with free software.

There are a number of tasks that are better done with such tools – tasks that matter – because they can help with things like climate change.

Should this be done with proprietary, secret tools or should we be trying to use tools that protect our freedom?

When I re-read Richard Stallman’s essays I’m reminded of the huge effort that went into creating the free software ecosystem that many of us use now – the ecosystem that allows me to type this words and share them with you.

But what is it that protects us?

Is it humanity and good feelings – sharing and brotherhood?

Or is it the copyleft – that legal instrument that means work you do for free on free software cannot simply be taken and owned by your employer?

I started this post with the vague thought that openness and transparency are good things.

I may have changed my mind half-way through.

Being completely open and transparent is like standing naked on a beach.

It is unlikely to attract people to you.

The most famous example of such an exercise is perhaps the story of Lady Godiva – but no one seems to be quite sure what the point of it all was.

Or perhaps it’s the story of the Emperor’s new clothes – but that is a story of self-delusion.

You see, the whole point of being open and transparent is not about what it does for your business.

It’s about what it does for your users, your customers.

Free software protects the rights of its users, their freedom to run, study, copy and improve a program.

And it does that by using the law – by using the conventions that society has come up with.

If you help your customers to do the same thing – you might create something unexpected.

You might create trust.

And that’s priceless.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 7.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are a lot of things worth learning out there.

That’s the purpose of this blog – to wander around a garden of ideas, looking, sniffing and picking ones that seem interesting or different.

And along the way, the way I look at things has shifted.

For example, I no longer think much of targets and tracking and effort.

The way most people are taught the way the world works is that they should set goals, decide what their targets are going to be and then go ahead and make it happen.

If you are working with other people who aren’t achieving what you think they should achieve – you should set them targets and monitor their progress to see how they are performing – and take corrective action when they fall short.

This kind of thinking is seen as normal, reasonable – of course you should do something like that.

But, if you are interested in Systems Thinking and the work of W. Edwards Deming, then you will counter that what happens is because of the system.

The system you have in place is perfectly designed to deliver the results you are getting.

If you want to get different results then you don’t start by setting goals and targets – you start by understanding the system and then you might see what you need to change to get different results.

Yeah so what, you say, that’s the same thing.

Start with targets and change how you act is the same as changing how you act and getting different results.

At this point, you are in a conversation that has no resolution.

Let me explain why.

Many years ago I used to go to University sessions where someone would talk to you about their religion and why you should consider making it yours as well.

I went to my first session by mistake – I was told there would be cake there.

I kept going because there was free food – but there was an obligation to talk to someone about What You Believed.

And it was fun, for a while – but eventually, after a number of discussions, I had a pretty good feel for how the argument would go.

They would say this and I would counter with that and then there would be something else with another response – and eventually we would come to certain points that had no way of being proved and we would have to just agree to disagree – because we believed different things.

It is difficult to resolve differing beliefs – it’s probably best not to try in the first place.

But that leaves us with a problem – what do we do when we see things differently?

Well, to boil a lot of theory into one simple, obvious approach – we have to take the time to listen.

We try and understand the other person’s point of view – their perspective – the way they see the world.

We don’t have to agree with it but we do have to take the time to try and see it for what it is.

And then, if we want to work together or live together we need to figure out an accommodation – a compromise – that will work for us in the situation we face.

A compromise that will, hopefully, make things better.

But don’t be lulled into thinking this is easy.

As we see from the world around us and the politics that happens the easy route is to hate and fight.

It takes effort to build a society that can live under common laws – especially if individual perspectives are very different or are subject to different laws.

It’s not really a cold end state that we get to – but rather one where we simmer instead of boiling.

Because in the end we share the same world.

Even if one of us happens to be looking at it upside down.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.05pm

Sheffield, U.K.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in. – Charles Dickens

I mentioned yesterday that I had come across James Thurber again.

Over the last few days I’ve been copying his drawings in my sketchbook – trying to get a feel for how they work and I noticed something.

In every drawing there is something happening.

You don’t see it at first – it doesn’t grab your attention because it just seems like his style.

But as you look more closely, draw the pictures, you see action, movement, tension in the lines.

Many of my drawings so far, for example, have a person standing there looking at something – passive, uninvolved, disinterested.

The fencers in Thurber’s depiction are anything but disinterested.

And it comes out using the spare economy of a few lines – two people walking past each other holding umbrellas in the rain, his animals creeping and peering, and my current favourite – a man hiding under a fortress made from his chairs and tables.

And that got me thinking about real life and work and trying to sell stuff.

All too often we look at things from a static point of view.

We see things as set in stone, as rules, as dogma – and we think that if we follow a formula then things will happen.

Think good thoughts every morning and the universe will move things around to give you what you want.

Things like that.

But really, what we need to be doing is looking for where the action is.

For example, you could commission any number of studies telling you what people should pay attention to.

But, you’ll do better focusing on what people are actually doing.

It reminds me of that story by Gary Halbert where he says that he’ll bet you that he can sell more burgers than you can.

You can pick any type of burger you want – the quality, the advertising, the colours.

You have the ability to do whatever you like to make your burgers the best in the world.

But he will still sell more – because all he wants is one thing.

A hungry crowd.

And that’s the action bit – that’s where the real thing is happening.

It’s what the Japanese call Gemba – where the work is done.

You can spend a lot of time thinking and agonizing and wondering.

And I think that is a good use of time – I’m not averse to thinking and I think theory is useful.

But when you come into the real world and try to apply that theory – you need to be able to see where the action is – where things are happening.

Because that’s where life happens to be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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