Category: Management

Tuesday, 8.11pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. – Donald E. Knuth

A lifetime ago I was given the task of understanding and maintaining a 4,000 line program written in c that did some clever stuff related to nanotechnology.

Clearly that sounded like no fun at all and so I spent a lot of time trying to find out how to do a better job – and came across the idea of literate programming.

Literate programming is something that has never taken off, something that is a curiosity, hidden in a dark corner, and ignored.

Unless you’re a certain kind of person, possibly.

Some people are doers – they approach the job with vigour and zest and testosterone and get it done.

If you want a wall knocking down these are the kinds of people you want.

Most of the time, actually, these are the people you want.

Then there are thinkers – people who ponder and wonder and plan – with many ideas about how to get things done but not the kind of people who get their hands dirty.

You probably avoid those kinds of people.

Then there are people in the middle, people who straddle the world of thinking and doing and who find that existing ways of doing things just don’t work for them.

Think about almost anything you spend time on.

There is time spent planning and time spent doing.

There’s always this duality – the thing that emerges and the thing that makes it emerge.

I drew a random number of boxes showing this concept and had no problem filling them with examples.

An interesting example that goes back a long way is the Talmud – the Jewish holy texts – that have what you might think of as a core text accompanied by notes and opinions from Rabbis over the years. You need both to understand the whole.

These days it’s easiest to see how this works when you look at computer programs.

All programs end up being written in a particular language.

Programmers create their code and then add comments to help others understand the flow of the code.

Some very macho programmers believe that comments are unnecessary – they can understand well written code just fine thank you very much.

In such programs you end up with a very big core and very little around it.

Now, Knuth’s discovery was that if he took the trouble to explain what his program did he ended up writing better programs – and so he created an approach called literate programming that tied together the exposition and the program – a little like the Talmud’s commentary and text.

And once you see that it’s better to have the two together than either one on its own you’ll see applications everywhere.

Take managing a project, for example.

You could work out what needs to be done and hand out tasks – give people jobs to do.

Or you could take the trouble to explain why you’re doing this project, what is expected, what the main pitfalls might be – and in general communicate – inform the people working with you.

And then do it again and again – make sure that it’s very clear.

All this takes time and effort, and it’s very tempting to just get on and focus on the tasks and core jobs.

But that’s also how mistakes get made – how things fall between the cracks and you end up with unhappy clients and failed projects.

Maybe trying the two together – taking what Knuth called a literate approach is the right way to go.

Except, that it’s not easy to do. It’s not a quick fix, an easy win.

It asks you to do hard things, like think and write and explain.

Which is why literate programming systems are hardly ever used – it appears that only those who create them use them.

I can see the reality of that.

For example, my interest in Soft Systems Methodology could be expressed as a system to do Literate Management – where we articulate and explain the models that sit behind what we do in practice.

The method I use, however, is customised around my interests – bringing together drawing, programming and management – and it is arguably a literate system that pulls together code and commentary.

But what inevitably happens when you overlap requirements is that the area of possibility decreases.

It’s like climbing mountains.

We all start off on level ground – billions of us are there right at the start.

As you go higher, the number of people that reach each level starts to fall until eventually, you have a few people who make it all the way to the top.

But that doesn’t mean that Literate Management is not something we can try and do more effectively.

If you have kids – it’s the difference between shouting at them and taking the time to talk to them and explain why you need them to do something.

If you manage a person it’s the difference between micromanaging their every move and being a coach and mentor.

When we realise that there is this duality – this layering going on between how to do something and why it needs to be done then we can see that by keeping them together we can get better results from more engaged people.

And the thing is, for some of us, it makes what could be a boring job much more interesting.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong. – Anonymous

I was browsing through some of Jeffreys Copeland and Haemer’s articles and came across one that talked about Zipf’s law, which leads to the idea that words you use a lot are short.

That makes sense – we’ve all listened to people who speak using big words and say nothing worth hearing.

As Churchill said, “short words are best, and the old ones, when short, are best of all.”

A few, seemingly unrelated things have come together in a way that seems worth thinking about.

First, have you ever thought about what the concept of digitalisation is going to do to the world around us?

There’s a 3Ds concept floating around, something that’s tries to capture the energy transition we’re going through – focused around decarbonisation, digitalisation and decentralisation.

And there’s another D – for dematerialisation somewhere as well.

But, does digitisation save energy?

This came home to me as I thought about email.

For one reason or the other I keep trying out terminal based mail programs like mutt.

What using one of these shows you is the amount of rubbish you get in the typical email.

It’s all prettification code wrapped around often forgettable content.

But, do you delete any of those emails – in these days where you can simply archive everything?

I don’t – and that got me thinking.

A single sheet of paper produces apparently 0.0092 pounds of CO2.

The content on that sheet could be stored digitally – or sent as an email, in which case it would have around one-sixtieth of the footprint – it seems.

But, what happens if you store that email on your cloud service for the next thirty years – because that’s what happens by default.

There will be a point where the paper starts to look more environmentally friendly.

And email is just one symptom of the never ending clutter that affects our lives – and which just doesn’t get deleted.

So, as an experiment, I’m now going to delete emails once they’ve been read unless I want to keep them for reference.

Because the only way we’re going to deal with the world the way it’s shaping up is to get better at ignoring most of it.

Which takes me to my second point.

I bought a android tablet at a charity shop for a few quid some time back.

You can get a small GNU/Linux system working on there, called gnuroot with a couple of variants, wheezy and aboriginal, that give you a small toolkit to play with.

The thing with GNU/Linux systems in these modern times is that they don’t ship with the standard text editor “ed“.

I guess ed is just too old fashioned for the hip people out there – in fact, that’s what it says in the ed source code.

Well, anyway, it did in version 1.4, which had these lines

GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant implementation of the standard Unix line editor. These days, full-screen editors have rendered `ed’ mostly of historical interest. Nonetheless, it appeals to a handful of aging programmers who still believe that “Small is Beautiful”.

Clearer minds have replaced this in version 1.15 with the following:

Ed is the ‘standard’ text editor in the sense that it is the original editor for Unix, and thus widely available. For most purposes, however, it is superseded by full-screen editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.

But they have also used a new, fancy compression format called lzip in that version, which doesn’t ship with the distribution on my very old tablet.

So, I’m stuck with a version that can be unzipped and compiled on my tablet and fortunately the views that people have matter less than whether the code works or not.

Now, you are probably wondering, what is my point here?

The point is that editors that have “superseded” ed in the main need you to have a full keyboard with control and escape keys and all the things needed to control the editor.

In a little tablet with a phone style keyboard that doesn’t exist – or is very hard to make work – but ed simply works like it should because it uses none of that.

On such devices, Zipf’s law matters as well, because long file or folder names are a pain to type without an tab/autocomplete feature so you remember why frequently used things should be short.

So ed actually a very useful tool to use on low spec devices or when you haven’t got a full keyboard.

And for a writer, who really needs something that is close to a typewriter I’d say that ed is the ultimate distraction free writing device.

But – it’s written off by the world – laughed at.

The quote that starts this page is about ed.

And that brings me to my third point, which is about autonomous cars.

I’ve just finished Autonomy: The quest to build the driverless car – and how it will reshape our world.

This is the future of transport – the thing that is going to radically change the way we move around over the coming decades.

One of the prime movers in this space is Google, which wanted a vehicle that could be used by operators of transportation-as-a-service operators.

They came up with an autonomous car code named “Firefly”, a friendly little thing that was easy to enter and had no controls at all – after all it was meant to drive itself.

It had two buttons – one to start your ride and one as an emergency stop – and a screen telling you how long was left until you arrived.

The future, in other words, takes away everything that doesn’t matter, letting you focus on what you need to get done – which is get from A to B.

Much like ed.

All the way from 1969 ed seems to have known where the future was heading half a century later – and that mocking quote seems rather more prescient now.

Which is why, in my view, it’s still too early to write off ed – because the minimalism and lack of fluff this tool shows is the kind of thinking we still need to combat the never-ending tide of clutter that’s overwhelming us physically and virtually.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. – Woody Allen

Most things fail.

Most businesses set up in the last century don’t exist any more.

The vast majority of species have died out.

And ideas once thought eternally true are being invalidated all the time.

Failure, then, is a natural thing to happen – everything dies – it’s the surviving that’s unusual.

These are the kinds of things Paul Ormerod explores in his book Why most things fail: Evolution, extinction and economics, taking an economist’s view of how businesses and governments operate or, more commonly, fail to operate.

There are some quite interesting ideas in the book – not least among them the fact that while it’s easy to say things about business it’s very hard to do them.

For example, it’s easy to say that you should make more money than you spend to stay in business – but how much?

Do you make a penny more, or ten times what you spend?

Should you locate yourself near a competitor or far away?

Do you specialise and do just one thing really well or do you become a generalist, able to do many things but not as well?

Ormerod explores failure in many forms – using an economists analytical insight.

What comes across, after all that analysis is just how poor maths is when it comes to explaining the world around us.

The models that are used to explore ideas are very simple and the one thing they tell us is that simple rules lead to complex behaviour you can’t predict from knowing just the initial rules.

In other words, the number of possible futures facing us is so vast that it’s impossible to predict which one will happen.

So, what should you do if you want to survive into one of those futures?

You need to do two surprisingly simple things in order not to fail – maybe even just either one of them.

The first thing is to get knowledge.

In the simple models agents with knowledge survive longer.

In the business world this means that before you start a fast food restaurant, get experience working in and managing a fast food restaurant.

Start a business you already understand and you increase your chances of success.

Start something you don’t know at all and you’re on the fast track to failure.

The second thing is to innovate – to try things out and create something new.

That’s where the successes that you’ve heard about come from – the facebooks and googles all come from people doing something new – from innovating.

In evolutionary terms that’s the equivalent of trying out really long fangs or extra spiky claws.

These are two really very obvious things, but like many obvious things we don’t do them as much as we should.

Learn your business and try out new things on your customers.

That’s simple, isn’t it?

Is it easy to do?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

“If something is not a “hell, YEAH!”, then it’s a “no!” – James Altucher

I was leafing through the big enough company: Creating a business that works for you by Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams and stopped at the bit where they talked about the importance of learning to say no.

It’s interesting, really, that we can only make progress when we realise what we should not do.

After all, there are unlimited options open to us, any number of routes we can take, a plethora of choices.

But we have to winnow them down to the ones we want to take.

And that takes some thought.

So, I wondered, what kind of model could you use to do that.

Let’s take a traffic light and see if that helps us think about how to spend our time.

What if we spent some time saying no, some time working for money and some time building assets.

What would that make our life look like?

Saying No.

Saying no, I think, is about being very choosy about what you say yes to.

That includes saying no to having a mess on your desk – but saying yes to the two painted stones and misspelled Christmas card from your son.

It means saying no to unpaid work, demands on your time for free consulting or help but saying yes to charitable work or pro-bono support you do because you want to.

It means saying no to having a drawer full of free pens from conferences and rubbish pencils but saying yes to two Tombow Mono100 2B pencils that feel like you’re writing with butter.

The thing with being productive or efficient or having good relationships is saying yes to having the things that matter – that add value or, to use Marie Kondo’s phrase, spark joy.

The rest has to go and be replaced with nothing – or with something that can be used to respond politely but firmly.

So, for example, if you keep getting requests to explain what you do then create something that you can point them to – we’ll come back to this in a minute.

Or draft a polite response that says why you can’t do what they want and use that draft again and again.

Because you need your time to do other things.

Working for money

Other things like working for money, although you need to proceed cautiously.

Working for money is a dangerous thing to do – in some cases it has benefits – like the money but you are also exchanging time that you’ll never get back.

Think of it this way – let’s say a very wealthy person came to you and asked how much you wanted to sell 10 minutes of your life – ten minutes that would pass to him and ten minutes less that you would live.

You might ask for quite a lot.

But, that’s the same thing you give away every day for whatever you make, and if you don’t make very much or are forced by an auction process to reduce your price to what the market clears at – what sort of bargain are you making?

The only time to work for money, given a choice, is when you are learning – when you’re growing.

If you turn up and that isn’t happening then you need to be concerned – because maybe you aren’t proceeding with as much caution as you should.

It’s the difference between working in a fast food place because you need how many every dollars they pay an hour and working there because you want to see how a business like that works and want to buy a franchise of your own eventually.

Building assets

Where you should be spending your time is building assets.

Assets are things that live on after you put your time into creating them.

A clear explanation of what you do on a website, in a video, in something you can show is an asset.

It’s the kind of asset that you can use when someone asks you to explain – rather than getting on the phone and losing an hour you can point them to it.

Assets can be those physical things you have – stuff that helps you serve customers but it’s also the content you have, the intellectual property, the skillset and the experience.

Your assets also include your relationships – the ones with colleagues, other professionals and, perhaps most importantly, your family.

There’s no point building a business that makes loads of money and losing your family along the way – finding that your grown up children have nothing in common with you and want nothing to do with you.

Think before you move

I suppose the point is that we’re all going through life pretty quickly – speeding up as we age.

Each time we come to do something that makes a demand on our time we should probably stop and look at a mental traffic light, always set to red.

Then move forward carefully, setting off on orange if everything seems safe and committing to the move when it’s all green.

Hopefully, when you look back over time, you’ll have gotten the decisions mostly right.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. – Arthur Ashe

I think we were in a market in France – a famous one – where a young Picasso once lived and where now painters sit and draw portraits of tourists.

The kids wanted ice lollies and so we were handed some by the vendor – and they expectantly opened the wrapping expecting a riot of colour and delight.

What they got was a brown, congealed mess.

To give the vendor his due, he did open a number of others – all of which were equally dismal – until we gave up and tried ice cream instead.

Maasaki Imai wrote the book Kaizen: The key to Japan’s competitive success in the early eighties and brought the idea of continuous improvement to the rest of the world.

If you want to improve things you can try two ways.

You can spend a lot of money and buy the latest technology.

Or you can use common sense and what you already have.

Kaizen is the second way and Imai’s second book Gemba Kaizen brings the idea of Kaizen to the workplace.

Gemba in Japanese means “real place”, the place where the action happens – where customers experience happens.

Any business, the book quotes, has two kinds of people – those that earn money and those that don’t.

People who come up with products, make them and sell them make money for the company.

Everyone else tags along for the ride.

It’s easier perhaps to think specifically of what happens when a customer comes in contact with your business.

They have expectations – they want strawberry ice cream.

In gemba, they get something – and hopefully it’s strawberry ice cream.

If it is, they are happy.

Now think of what everyone who doesn’t work in gemba does with their time.

Are they helping the people that are in gemba or are they trying to control them?

If you’ve stepped away from the coal face – if you’re a manager or worse, if you’ve come in as a manager and you’ve never done the work then what’s the approach you take?

Do you manage your desk, manage by numbers, manage by KPIs?

Or do you go to gemba and see what is happening for yourself and support the work being done there?

The question is rhetorical really, because the framing of the structure tells you what Imai thinks.

If you don’t do the work that helps meet customer expectations then your only job is to support those who do.

If you see your job as controlling them then you’re going to deliver a poor result.

The ideal thing really would be to have no management at all.

We all simply work in gemba – on things that deliver value to customers.

Because here’s the thing.

Being a manager sucks.

The work is where you get any sense of accomplishment.

And working with people you like, admire and trust makes it fun.

So, if you want to make a difference the axiom to follow, according to Imai, is “Go to gemba first.”

Go and see – and then you will see what to do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 6.59pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I told you. I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February 2nd, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day

I have been reading about writers and one thing stuck in my mind.

A writer’s life, one said, is actually quite boring.

You do the same thing day after day – you get a routine going that works for you.

You get up at the same time.

Maybe you get up early and write, or maybe you go to work, come back and write then.

Maybe you get some time to exercise and you write after that.

A writer’s daily journal pretty soon must look something like this.

“Got up. Had breakfast. Wrote. Had lunch. Wrote. Had dinner. Watched telly. Went to bed.”

Well, that’s an ideal daily routine anyway – for many of us who want to do some writing family and work and odd jobs get in the way.

Which is why it’s important to schedule time to do the writing when no one else is around if you do have those distractions – like first thing or late at night.

If you have watched Groundhog Day you’ll remember that once Phil realises that he’s going to live the same day forever he starts to use it well.

He learns to play the piano, do ice sculpture and be nice to people.

It’s a repeated game, one you play every day and once you get used to the idea that every day you get a chance to do it again.

But this time you get to do it better.

Not to be depressing or anything but I count down my writing days assuming that I’m going to have a few decades still – which works out to 13,818 days left, counting today.

Not as long as you think, given we all start out with around 30,000.

Less than half actually.

Now, for some people that means that they need to go and see things, travel, have experiences, meet more people.

For some of us that means we want to read and write.

Which is why I found coming across a collection of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographical material edited by his daughter, Janet J. Asimov so interesting.

It’s titled “It’s been a good life”, after what he said at the end.

In the book he talks of a dream he once had.

The context is that he’s not religious and when you think of the kind of heaven different religions suggest is waiting for you they don’t seem that attractive – to him anyway.

Would you want to go to Valhalla and spend all your time either eating and drinking or fighting everyone else?

What would you do if you went to heaven and had the rest of eternity ahead of you?

In Asimov’s dream, he’s died and in heaven – he’s knows it’s there because of the clouds and fields and the angel smiling at him.

He explains that he’s an atheist and probably not supposed to be here – and the angel tells him, rather sternly, that that’s their decision, not his.

So then he looks around and asks “Is there a typewriter here that I can use?”

The point is that he knows he’s been in heaven for the last half century already because his heaven is in the act of writing itself.

It would be nice, I suppose, if we were all so lucky in being able to do what we want to do with our time here.

If you aren’t, however, going round in circles for a while may be one way of getting you there.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh