Category: Management

Sunday, 8.49pm

Sheffield, U.K.

They makes cages in all sizes and shapes, you know. Bank-shaped some of ’em, carpets and all. – Bert in Mary Poppins

For many of us a job started as something we fell into and then became something we started to depend on and then became something that the people around us relied on.

How about bosses?

For some business owners a sense of feeling responsible for their employees is a very real thing – something that affects how they make decisions about who to hire and keep and let go.

For other owners – perhaps not quite so much.

But what about employees? How many are loyal to the business that has put food on the table for the past several years? How many would just walk away for a little bit more?

And how many stay, afraid that they will never make as much somewhere else – afraid that they would not get another job?

We watched Mary Poppins this weekend and Dick Van Dyke as Bert said to the Banks children that the person he felt sorry for was their father – caged in that cold, heartless bank where he worked.

And, for many of us, has the modern world indeed become one of cages?

The typical day for someone working in an office is effectively a process of prisoner transfer – from vehicle to building and back again.

You might be your own prison office but the results are much the same.

You’re dragged away from your warm cosy space and transported somewhere else at a time decided by others.

There’s something vaguely uncomfortable about seeing things like that. Aren’t you there of your own free will?

You signed a contract – agreed to the corporation’s terms.

You are there in the way that you are because you chose to be.

Isn’t that right?

I’m not sure. I think the conditioning starts early.

Some people suggest it all started with the invention of modern armies that needed well trained recruits – a structure that was equally useful to create well-trained recruits for businesses.

So, is education really all about equipping people to fill jobs? To fit into the openings available out there?

By the time you emerge, blinking, out of school and university in your twenties what most of us have learned is that we need to look for a job.

It takes ten to twenty years to get good at something.

Some of us do – we get good enough to perhaps start our own businesses, create new industries.

Although that can be a whole new learning experience as many of us have never run a business before.

Others reach a plateau and watch with increasing concern as other younger, cheaper, better trained recruits look hungrily at their jobs.

So, what does all this boil down to?

Well, if you were in prison for ten years, what would you do every day?

Me – I’d read and exercise – preparing for the day when I’d get out.

I’d hope that I’d know enough and have enough health to be able to start a second life.

At the start of a working life maybe the next ten years is just a sentence you have to serve to get skills that someone else values enough to pay for.

If you haven’t got those skills then freedom is likely to be cold and miserable.

If you’re in a cage – so be it.

After that you might think about opening the door – it’s been unlocked all this time waiting for you to decide when to walk through.

The question is are you brave enough after all this time?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.32pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It worries me that young singers think you can shortcut the training and go straight to fame and fortune, and programmes like Pop Idol have encouraged that – Lesley Garrett

I was listening to Jay Abraham’s podcast for the first time and he said something that is obvious and yet clearly not obvious at the same time.

Most businesses, he said, do exactly what other businesses like them do.

You look around and act in the way other people act.

And that’s not surprising. For years we’ve been taught to conform, to do what we are told, to say at the table until we’re finished and do our homework.

So we end up looking to those around us for confirmation that what we’re doing is right.

You see this in financial markets – most fund managers want to be in the middle of the pack. Not the best, not the worst – not an outlier.

In a Goldilocks band of not too hot and not too cold – just right where there is little chance of being blamed.

So what happens after ten, twenty years of thinking like that?

We naturally assume that the way to do it is the way others do it – the way we see it being done around us.

So we see websites that look identical, messaging that is a variation on a theme, everyone trying to stand out by doing much the same thing as everyone else.

Are there shortcuts? Perhaps you get there swinging like a gymnast, flying from bar to bar to the top in one smooth motion?

Of course, you need to be a gymnast first.

For the rest of us the stairs are the only sensible option.

So this poses a problem – how can you stand out if you play it safe?

That’s the point at which a quick response starts to falter.

Jay, for example, talks about what you could do differently. For an audience of real estate agents, for example, you could stress that your list can be found nowhere else – that you have gems that no one else will see first.

That, of course, requires you to corner a market, something which is not easy to do.

Or you could stand out because of who you become – you could wear orange like Joe Pulizzi, swear like Gary Vaynerchuck or get a job as the CEO of Microsoft.

Maybe the reality is simpler than that.

Your competitors behave in a certain way because that’s how buyers want them to act.

What they show is what the market wants – that’s why it’s there in the first place.

No one wants to hire someone with a completely different point of view.

For example, there are Government guidance documents that are plain wrong. Wrong in a way that can be proved mathematically.

But, can you convince someone with a Government job to do something differently?

The fact is people will do what they feel is the lowest risk option – not the best one, not the most exciting but the one that is safest.

We’re wired to hate risk much much more than we love opportunity.

And that’s why shortcuts don’t work.

We don’t trust them.

We value a track record, a demonstrable history of achievement and improvement.

In most things the key is little and often not a lot every once in a while.

As Longfellow remarked, people don’t get to the top “by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.02pm

Sheffield, U.K.

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. – Mark Twain

Megan McArdle, in her book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is The Key To Success, writes about the spaghetti problem – a challenge where teams are given some spaghetti and asked to build the tallest structure they can.

Things kind of work out as expected.

The engineers get it sort of right and build something that stands up.

Business students and lawyers spend all their time arguing about who is the leader and don’t actually build anything.

The ones who get it right are the kids – who crack on with it and figure it out as they go along.

Crucially – they tend to be the ones that ask for more spaghetti – and there’s nothing in the rules to stop them getting more.

They just didn’t know what everyone else assumed – that what you had was what you got.

There’s something common about many successful business people. You often wonder how they got to be so successful – and it certainly wasn’t their smarts.

Sometimes, you can talk to them and think to yourself “If you only knew how crazy an idea that was you’d never get started.”

But they don’t know. And they go right ahead and make a ton of money.

Mark Twain’s comment is tongue-in-cheek but it’s one of those comments that is also literally true.

Industries get turned upside down when someone comes along and creates a new way of doing things – something that everyone thought was impossible.

After all, people once thought there wouldn’t be a need for more than ten or so computers in the whole world.

So, should we cultivate ignorance then? Is not knowing stuff the answer to being successful?

And that’s not the case either. Those successful people are smart – but just not in the traditional way. They’re smart about people, about what sells, about what excites others. They’re smart about getting smart people to work for them.

It’s a kind of smart that’s called instinct.

When that’s paired with confidence those people go far because they’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done while the rest of us play it safe and do the sensible thing.

And there are two other things.

One is luck.

You can’t discount the effect of luck in how many things turn out.

And the second is who wants it more.

The lawyers and the business students want to lead the group.

The engineers want to figure it out.

The kids want to win.

In any situation the people who want it the most are the ones who are going to make the most of things.

So, for those of us who do not have Mark Twain’s qualities it may be useful to act as if we do – to stop letting what we know and the fears we have get in the way of what we could be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.53pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other. – Bill Gates

Recently a German supermarket removed all non-German products from its shelves – leaving them almost bare.

It was trying to draw attention to just how many products come from outside the country – the result of a globalised economy – and how sparse life would be if we could only have things that were made by others like us.

If you walk down any high street in the UK you’ll see a lot of stuff for sale and much of it is made in China.

You know it is, because it says so on the label.

It’s the information on the product that tells you what to think – whether you see it as an expensive high end gadget or a cheap throwaway.

If you walk through a factory it’s quite possible that you’ll see the same product going into different packaging and being sold for different prices, with one perhaps three times as much, just because of the information content on the packet.

Bill Gates was really focused on the technology part of Information Technology when he talked about its relationship with business.

But what is information doing to businesses around us and how can you make it work for you?

Information is weird – as Wikipedia explains – it’s easy to create but hard to trust. Easy to spread but hard to control.

You or I can now write what we think and publish it without needing agents, publishers, printing technology or much capital.

Whether people read what we write is a different story.

Why should anyone take anything we write more seriously than anything else that gets in front of them.

The fake news industry, with people engaged full time in creating stories with catchy headlines so they can surf the traffic monetisation wave is probably going to beat the pants off you.

Mainly because they give people what they wish was true.

Let’s say you make something using a 3-D printer – now technology that you can have at home.

If you use a set of plans provided by the manufacturer does the thing you make have value?

Could you go down to the market and sell it to someone passing by?

Probably, but not for much, as if you were able to do that others would use the same plans to try and get some of that profit you’re raking in.

So is the value in the thing you’ve made or the ideas and designs you used to make it in the first place?

The thing with ideas is that they don’t really have intrinsic value – not in the way a gold mine does.

Ideas are precious and valuable but it’s not obvious how they are economically precious and valuable.

That’s because once you’ve had an idea it costs nothing to make copies of that idea.

If you give your idea to one person, nothing stops you from giving it to someone else, or for the first person to pass it on in turn.

In fact, once the idea is out in the open, it’s quite hard to keep it secret.

Finally, you could tell someone that you have a great idea but unless you tell them the idea they have no way of telling whether you’re right or wrong.

Ideas then are great to have. When they’re expressed as books and art and music they make society better.

Imagine just how joyless your life would be if you didn’t have music and colour and books.

So, things like copyright law were created, not to protect businesses, but to give authors and artists a way to make money from their ideas.

And that’s a confusing things for businesses and people who have, for a few millenia, made their money from controlling property.

Now property is only worth what you get from the information about it.

A house in a good school area is worth more than one that is not – and you know the good schools and bad schools because of the information available to you.

You start to see the way people are dealing with this as the new titans of the information business emerge.

Tim Ferriss, for example, has written about he stopped worrying about his books being stolen and pirated and focused instead on giving his readers the best experience he could.

It just makes sense because while some people will steal your stuff it costs you nothing. It’s not like they’ve stolen your TV or car. Instead of letting that worry you focus on the tens, thousands or millions of consumers who do business with you.

The challenge for us is being able to figure out a way to work in this new economy where what you do is worth something between zero and a lot.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.00pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table. – Natalie Goldberg

Happy New Year.

The great thing about the first day of a new year is that you have a chance to change things at the same time that millions of others are planning to as well.

Clearly, not everyone is going to succeed, but that isn’t the point.

The point is that you ought to at least try.

We were watching a film the other day where a character quoted Dr Seuss, “You have a brain in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

And one of the things that is either enjoyable or panic-inducing is choosing your tools.

I can spend far too much time obsessing about whether I should be doing things electronically or on paper. Whether it’s best to use a software program or code something myself. Whether a reporter’s notebook is better than a Filofax.

That’s just the way I’m wired and, quite probably, many others as well.

That’s why so many rules and resolutions and goals don’t work.

They may have worked for someone else, worked really well, but that doesn’t mean they’ll work for you.

What you need to do is figure out what will work for you and that may be getting organised or getting stuck into the first thing you see.

Trying to get it perfect often means not getting started at all.

Which brings us back to tools.

What is going to work for you this year?

One approach that works for me is to think of having lots of small tools rather than a singe big one.

Sort of like having a toolbox filled with hammers and screwdrivers instead of carrying around a single Swiss Army knife.

If you think of this like writing a computer program – you’re creating a program to follow this year.

The chances are very slim that you know exactly what program to write if you haven’t already got one in place.

So it makes sense to start with what’s important right now rather than what might be important in five years.

The more lines of code you write the more likely it is that the program will fail to run or have bugs when you do run it.

Small programs are best. And small programs that work together are even better.

So, for example, if I decided that I was going to run every day for the next year I’d probably fail in a week or less.

But, if I tried to get my 10,000 steps every day there’s a good chance I could do that and get in the odd run.

How could you combine that with better diet, more rest and better time with your family?

What could you do to make your job more interesting and work on stuff that felt like it was helping someone?

When it comes down to it we live our lives following programs – often ones that have been written for us and downloaded into our brains by parents and society.

The first step, then, to getting control of your life is to start writing your own program.

And today is a good day to get started with that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh