Category: Management

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Are You Preparing For The Changing World Of Work?

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Thursday, 9.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you be?

If you’re running a large organisation, putting the systems in place to help your team work anytime anywhere has been a top priority for your IT team.

It’s also been the priority for the last tech giants for the last decade. And now you can run your entire business from the cloud.

If you’re a newish company, that way of working must just seem natural.

But here’s the challenge, as I see it.

A Google funded study in 2010 found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that collaboration and innovation are closely correlated.

So, encouraging the first should help with the second.

So, how do you go about that? Well, you start by providing the tools that organisations like Google sell – according to them anyway.

And that raises other issues, and perhaps some of these are familiar to you as well.

In most organisations, the balance between having room to create and innovate and the need to be secure and locked down usually ends with everything being locked down.

You’re free to do anything you want, as long as it’s in Microsoft Excel or Google Docs.

And that is increasingly not very much. In the online version of Excel, for example, you can’t really do much with macros or automation. Getting started is harder in Google docs.

Many employees in companies are probably frustrated.

Frustrated because they know what good should look like, but they’re working with tools that are so limited for security reasons that they might as well be working with a typewriter for all the increased productivity they get.

Now, that’s not an easy circle to square. Yes you’d love to give all employees a free rein to do whatever they like. But you don’t want your system crashed or open to anyone, especially someone who decides to delete all your data because they have a grudge.

I know of many organisations that still struggle with simple tasks – like doing a mail merge. They still have to edit and send out documents one by one.

At the other extreme – you have some who say that what you need in a company to be innovative is people that wear t-shirts that say things like “Safety third”.

The first time someone actually has an accident, however, the lawyers will come in and close everything down.

It may be that we’re in the middle of trying to reconcile and understand this new way of working.

Or – more likely – we’ve simply had this problem all the time. How do we get people and machines to work better together.

And the place to start is – we don’t.

Machines are good at repetitive, mechanical tasks.

People are good at creative and social tasks.

We should start by getting machines and people to do what they are good at.

It’s only when we have to get machines and people working together that we should, very reluctantly, put them together.

Does that sound bonkers. Completely unreasonable?

Well… let me ask you this.

If you weren’t able to get to your mobile phone all the time – perhaps you left it at home – just how much more work would you get done without being interrupted?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Do You Need To Know To Be A CEO?

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Wednesday, 9.42pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

Would you want the top job – to be in charge – to be the one with the responsibility?

Shakespeare said it best – Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

The thing is… even if you never want to be the CEO of a massive multi-billion dollar organisation, you’re still the CEO of something. Your own life. Your family – even if it’s a joint role.

And it’s worth taking the effort to think like a CEO – to think like a person who has the responsibility for making decisions, allocating resources and deciding strategy.

Because… as the saying goes, you’re either working towards your own goals, or you’re working towards someone else’s goals.

So, what are the key things you need to know – distilled from this McKinsey interview guide?

1. What’s your direction of travel?

All strategy comes down to this question – which path are you going to take, which road will you follow?

Is it the one with the footfall, or the one less travelled by?

You can dress this up as vision, mission and lots of other buzzwords, but the first decision you make is to look around and point in the direction that you think is the right one.

2. Where did you start?

You’ve heard the saying, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve reached there?.

Well, if that’s point 1, the point following closely behind is knowing where you started from.

The ambition of the vast majority of professional managers is to manage their numbers.

They need to set and meet targets – they’re under enormous pressure from the markets and investors and stakeholders and those kinds of people.

Beware of people who always make their numbers. As Warren Buffett wrote, people who always make their numbers will at some point be tempted to make up their numbers.

If you want to make real, meaningful change, you need to be clear on where you started.

That’s your baseline. And that is fixed. Although, as we know from painful experience, nothing is really fixed. A number can be anything you want it to be.

I read a story of a young person who went to his family accountant to be trained. He did the accounts as the rules said, and showed them to the accountant.

The accountant laughed, called his uncle and asked how much profit they wanted to report this year. Then, the accountant reworked the numbers to make that figure work, staying within the rules.

So, perhaps it’s best not to worry too much about accounts.

Cash flow, on the other hand, that’s another thing altogether.

3. Culture – what’s that?

Well, chasing point 2, culture is about the belief system that builds around you as the CEO.

A CEO that encourages gaming, like in the accounting example below, will end up creating an organisation where gaming is considered a normal way of operating.

Bernie Madoff anyone?

On the one hand, creating a good culture is pretty easy – just treat people as they would like to be treated.

On the other hand, it’s a chaotic and constantly evolving function of social groups, and organisations are more about politics than about achieving any real rational purpose.

And because most of us know what we want but find it hard to appreciate what others want, we’re sort of blind to what needs to happen.

But that’s something you can learn by simply opening your eyes and ears. As Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot by watching

4. Then, it’s all about you

This is simple. What skills are needed to do the top job.

Then, do you have those skills?

5. What do you need if you’re not going to fail?

Many people think that being the CEO is about being the boss – having final say in everything.

That only happens when you also have control – when you’re the founder or have a controlling share or both.

The rest of the time you have people breathing down your neck. You’ve been hired to fix things, or grow the business, or make money. So why aren’t you?

You need to be clear on the non-negotiables, the red lines of your career as the boss.

Do you want final say on hiring? Do you get to tell the Chairman that his or her kid can’t just get a senior job?

You need to be clear on what you need to get the job done – no questions asked.

6. Are you going to make friends with everyone?

As the boss, you’re going to be the face of the company, inside and outside.

You’ll need to be friends with the cleaning crew, the administrators, the consultants, the contractors, investors, shareholders… the whole bunch of people that all want some time or attention from you.

Are you the kind of person that likes that? Or can at least cope with that? Or be really good at that?

You really need to be the kind of person that goes and sees what’s happening at the front line. That mucks in. That has facetime with as many people as you can.

They won’t come to you – you need to go to them. At least that’s what you need to do if you see your job as CEO as serving and enabling your team to do their best work.

Because… when it comes down to it you don’t actually do anything as the CEO – whether you succeed or not depends on whether everyone else around you has the tools and ability and drive to do their best.

So, perhaps the most important thing you should do as CEO is remove the things that get in the way of the people you rely on.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why Trying To Respond To What’s Going On Is A Bad Idea

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Monday, 9.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is unimportant – to get intimidated by the very visible success we see others having all around us in a connected world.

Let’s say you’re starting a business and it’s in a pretty competitive industry like software development? How are you going to compete against everyone else out there?

You see this all the time, especially in new areas. For example, there is an emerging literati of blockchain, big data and machine learning specialists that seem to be doing very well, if you look at their presence on social media.

And you inevitably get marketers who come along and ruin everything.

Take reciprocation, for instance. That’s the idea that if you do something nice for someone else, they’ll feel obligated to you and do what you ask.

The basic idea is a sound one – be a nice person. Do things for others without being asked.

What this turns into is a series of posts that tag an influencer, praising them, with the aim of getting the influencer to thank the praiser and lift them into the limelight.

You’ll find a number of methods like this that promise to help you “growth hack” your way to success. Need content – just reach out to a hundred influencers, get their thoughts on the subject, compile that into a book and you’re on your way.

There are two fallacies at work here, and a knowledge of investing principles will help you identify and step around them.

The first is this – if you’re finding something out for the first time on the internet, the chances are that you’re too late to profit from it.

Many people invest in stocks the wrong way.

They see a stock going up and up, and get excited. They see it being covered in the paper – on the news – in tips in newsletters. They pile in, eager to ride that baby up.

Then, it turns and sinks. They’re sitting on a loss, panic and sell.

Buying high and selling low is not a good investment strategy.

But somehow it becomes the default strategy of many people.

If you don’t think you’re one of them, check to see if you sell much on Ebay. Do you buy (or does someone in your house buy) lots of nice things that they never wear and then sell them on Ebay later?

Do they calculate the loss they’ve made on buying new stuff and selling it second hand? Or are they overjoyed over the amount they’ve made selling on Ebay?

If it’s the latter, perhaps you shouldn’t let them manage your investment portfolio.

The point here is this. By the time the general public realises that something is happening with a stock, the thing that is happening is well on its way and close to petering out.

For a dramatic demonstration of this, just check out what happened to crypto last year and then what’s happened this year.

Most of the stuff on the Internet tries to get you to empty your wallet in return for learning how to make money on the Internet.

All the hacks you’re picking that rocketed others to success are ones that are unlikely to work as millions of others like you try and take advantage of them as well.

As Warren Buffett wrote about poker, “If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

Don’t be that guy.

The second fallacy is thinking that you can predict the future and call the next big thing.

Many investors try and call sectors. Blockchain is the next big thing. A VC is going to raise a $50m blockchain fund. A startup has raised $30m in 31 minutes. So, it must be hot and worth investing in.

It’s incredibly hard to outperform the general market. You’re going to fail over 90% of the time.

Yet people persist in trying to do that. They argue that active investment adds value, even though the majority of active managers lag the market once their fees are taken into account.

The only people who get wealthy from actively managing your money are the managers.

So, what can you do to hold on to your money?

Most successful strategies are a variation on sticking to your knitting. Buy the whole index. Put the same amount of money in each month. Keep it simple.

Focus on your behaviour – not on what the market is doing. The market is there to serve you, not to guide you.

Okay… so what does that mean for me?

The point is that you can look at what’s happening around you and decide that the way for you to succeed is to do what other people are doing.

But – the chances are that kind of thinking isn’t going to work.

It isn’t going to work because by the time you see how the trick is done, the magic is gone.

Instead, you’re better off focusing on the work – the stuff you do that makes you feel like you’ve had a good day at the office. Or the workshop. Or the shed.

If you focus on the work, then one day it may lead to people getting to know your work, appreciating your work, spreading the word and eventually result in a raving fanbase who follow your every word.

If you try and build the fanbase without putting in the work – by trying to do stuff that you think will appeal to them – you’ll end up creating a shallow and insipid copy of someone else’s magic.

Real investors don’t chase trends.

They get in position, do the research and get ready. And then a trend comes along and lifts them up.

Do work that matters to you.

Then it won’t matter whether you get anything else. It’ll be gravy.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Know What’s Working And What’s Not?

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Saturday, 9.16pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

Do you know how you learn? How does your brain work when it’s busy learning?

I remember watching a TED talk – can’t find the reference now – but it had a concept that stayed with me.

Our brains create new connections when we learn, literally rewiring our brains as we go through the learning process.

But, it doesn’t happen all at once. Learning or experiencing something for the first time lays a chemical trail.

Doing it more lays down more chemicals – more connections – more wiring that is related to what we’re doing.

This simple concept – the idea that how much we learn is linked to the amount of related wiring that’s built up in our brains – leads to certain logical positions.

1. Not everything in life is equal

When you’re young, you might have the time to do lots of things. You might be good at a sport, enjoy certain classes, be sociable.

Very soon, however, you start having to make choices.

At University, given the choice between playing competitive sports at a high level, achieving high grades and having a sizzling social life, you’ll end up picking any two.

And even that’s probably hard to do. You might end up putting one first.

2. Where you are is because of what you did

There’s a rule when you’re doing customer validation – trying to find out if your product has a real market or not.

Never ask someone what they would do.

For example – would you buy my new vegan rice cooker that also grills chicken?

You might say that you might…

But here’s a better question. What kinds of kitchen appliances have you bought in the last year?

That’s going to tell me a lot more about the kind of person you are and what you actually need in the kitchen.

What you’ve already done is the best predictor of what you’re going to do in the future. Once again, the trails you’ve laid down are the clue to the trails you’ll take.

3. It’s unlikely that things will work the same way exactly

Think of the last forest you visited.

Did you follow a trail? Several trails?

Were those trails identical to any other forest you visited? Were the trees obliging enough to be in the same places? The rocks situated exactly right?

The trails emerged – as a result of topography, footfall, perhaps plans drawn up by whoever was responsible for looking after it.

And the thing with lives and companies and organisations and countries is that they’ve been built up in this way.

In any company, for example, there is probably a general structure – a hierarchy of some sort – but the character and nature of the company is set by the unique people that make it up – and their lives and unique history.

And here lies one of the problems of organisational development.

Say you want to change something or do something new. Perhaps put in a new ERP system.

In many cases you need to change the entire way the organisation works to fit in with the new system. That’s easier than adapting the system to the organisation.

And it’s really hard changing the way people work. It’s easier to change the people.

So, if you really want to change the way an organisation works, throw out all the existing systems and install a new one. But if you want to succeed, you’ll need to get rid of the existing people as well.

It’s easier to just start from scratch.

And this is why startups work – the established paths and trails of organisations work for them where they are. But they’re the result of a unique set of circumstances at a period in time.

Some of the principles may be timeless but the methods and specific activities are less so.

4. It’s easier to build where it’s easier to build

I used to think that you could change things easily. Put in a new system or process and that would fix any problem you had.

That was naive. I know that now.

It’s like trying to change someones mind. You’re better off just not trying. The only mind you can change is your own.

When it’s just you – you can change things quite easily. Some of the time anyway.

When you’re part of a team it gets harder. The only way really is to spend a lot of time training people in the right way from the start.

And then you need to realise that they will adapt whatever you teach to their own way, so rather than expecting perfection, you need to make sure that they meet a minimum standard.

Working with others is often about finding the lowest common denominator rather than peak performance.

If you’re working with an existing organisation, as a new CEO for example, you need to spend most of your time first watching what’s going on.

What is happening right now. Where are the trails and how are they laid out?

Take the picture above. It’s pretty obvious where the activity is. Where things are working.

A wise CEO would look carefully at the existing situation. Then, instead of trying to put something new in, they’d look for a compromise – an accommodation – that improves things.

Like widening a trail that is used a lot to make it easier for visitors.

Big bang change is seductive in its simplicity. But it doesn’t work.

What works is building on what’s already there – whether it’s your own unique set of skills and experiences or that of an organisation.

That’s the way to keep growing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Select A Sales Strategy – Lessons From The Street

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Friday, 7.14pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We’ve just spent a few days wandering around Barcelona. Several miles and aching feet – looking at some stunning architecture, grand parks and fabulous views.

And then there are the streets.

The most famous one, La Rambla, runs from the centre down to the sea and if you’re interested in sales strategy has lessons everywhere you look.

Let’s start with the most obvious one – the one that smacks you in the face.

These are people who sell stuff on the street, from catapults for children, to fans and plastic trinkets and jewellery. They carry a small number of items, in a plastic bag or in their hands, and set them out on the street for you to look at.

They are presumably unlicensed sellers – as when the police turn up they disappear quickly.

Some have large sheets filled with higher value items like branded shoes and designer handbags – with an ingenious string mechanism that means the whole lot can be quickly bundled up and the seller can move on.

One would assume that these are counterfeit – but it’s not clear. There are signs saying that there is a fine for buying from blanket salespeople. But, when you overhear the negotiations for a pair of Nike shoes, for example, the price is not that far off a shop price to start with.

That may just be good negotiating practice – just like when one of them tells you that they made the object they’re selling themselves. It’s odd, however, that the police simply watch the sellers setting up.

What’s common to these sellers is that they are mobile. And they sell commodities – certainly when it comes to plastic fans and counterfeit stuff.

But how can such low value stuff sustain such a high number of sellers?

Presumably there is an organised system behind this. A warehouse where someone with little capital can go and stock up on commodities and then flog them on the street.

And the warehouse is where the big money is being made. Stuff that can be made for 7p in China lands in the warehouse, is presumably sold for 50-70p to the sales person who then makes 30p a sale.

Not a get rich quick strategy for the person selling on the street. But if you’re possibly in the country illegally in the first place, perhaps your only option to get enough money to pay for rent and food.

So what do others do – the ones that operate legally?

An interesting variant on the mobile approach is to add a custom element – like elaborate statue artists or street dancers.

There you’re paying them for a performance that they do – and essentially tipping them for entertainment.

Larger traders start moving to fixed premises and custom strategies catering to a general audience.

For example, the stalls on the street have Barcelona related stuff – magnets, figurines and cards. A lot of people like that kind of stuff as a reminder of their trip.

Or they’re food places – ice cream sellers, restaurants.

The thing with going fixed is that the better the location, the more you pay for your patch of real estate.

An alternative step is to go niche. On a different street, closer to the coast, you find people with stalls selling elaborate masks – the kind you’d use for a masked ball. Specialist places that cater to a niche clientele.

That’s one way to stand out.

But most of the stuff you see on the street is simple. You’re not really going to be able to do a complex sell on someone passing on the street. It’s mostly stuff that you either want or don’t.

Except perhaps when it comes to food.

There are lots of plastic food choices catering to tourists and, if you’re hungry and tired, you might go for the fixed price options just to get something quickly.

But it’s worth going off the main streets and looking for more local fare – stuff that is real food with atmosphere and local chat. Something that gives you a more complex experience than cheap food piled high.

When it comes down to it, sales is less about pushing and more about positioning.

The way in which you position your product almost leads inevitably to a particular strategic approach.

You’re never going to expect great quality from a street seller – and if you think you’re getting a bargain, you’re always going to be wrong.

So, a street seller is going to have to push and persuade and charm you into buying from them.

You’ll be safe in a big chain store located in a shopping mall – but it’s not going to be exciting or different or anything you couldn’t get right here at home.

A bored sales clerk isn’t going to care too much whether you buy or not.

And between those two extremes are several sellers who are trying to get the right combination of characteristics to stand out and appeal to you.

The difference now is that you have the Internet on your side.

I found that I was checking Ebay to see what prices were for commodities on the street and finding it easy to step away when the quoted price was three times the price online.

The chances are that you’ll increasingly rely on recommendations from others to make decisions – from which hotels to select to the best places to eat.

So the sellers in the middle would do well to manage their reputation online – and many are doing just that. The statue artists, for example, display their Instagram information if you want to follow them.

Street selling is fascinating to watch – but it’s possibly the hardest, most time-consuming and lowest margin activity you can do.

It is a good way to learn if what you have actually has appeal – a good validation method when you’re testing the market.

But I wouldn’t recommend making it an core part of your route to market.

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What Is Your Job As A CEO?

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Sunday, 8.02pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I was thinking about what Tech CEOs have to do – what does the Chief Executive Officer of a tech firm need to think about and do every day?

Imagine you’re the CEO of a company. Even if it’s the CEO of your own one person business – you’re still in charge and everyone looks to you for direction.

It’s a scary position to be in – to be so completely and totally in charge. No one else that you can point to or blame. It’s not a position you can run away from.

In some ways it’s like being a writer or an artist. Every creative person, without exception, suffers from self doubt and isolation.

You’re making something – creating words or pictures or music. And when you’re done people will see the results of your work and judge you.

You have to get beyond those worries, push through them and create and be damned. The rest of the world doesn’t matter – if you create just for you.

As a CEO, you’re creating a business. More than anyone else in the business, the responsibility for shaping and bringing the business to life rests with you.

So, I was wondering, do tech companies have to do anything different? Are tech companies different in some way? What do you need to be aware of?

1. The basics – people, process, performance

Well, clearly there are the basics – who you hire, what they do and how well they do it.

And obviously, you must have a product.

Your job is to get the most out of your team, to motivate them, to work harder than them, to show them that you care – for the product and about them.

It’s a job where you need to have a lot emotionally invested in the business. It’s not like being an adviser or consultant – you are the business. To everyone that’s interested, anyway.

2. Be careful what you say

The thing with being the boss is that people listen to what you say.

In meetings, you’ll find people positioning themselves so they can watch you but you can’t watch them. People will hang onto your words and build on your ideas – whether good or bad.

What you say will matter.

Warren Buffett writes about this – it’s example number 3 of what he calls the institutional imperative – as follows

(3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops

No one will tell you that you’re doing something stupid. Not your employees anyway. Maybe your investors – perhaps some members of an independent Board.

But, if you’re aware that your every whisper can become a shout as it moves along the organisation, you might be more careful what you say.

3. Understanding markets and trends

A big part of your job is looking outside the company. What’s going on in the market, what are the trends?

Do you understand what your competitors are doing, which new firm is trying to turn your market inside out, and are you positioned to be lifted up by a trend or battered and tossed by it?

It’s things like knowing your Total Addressable Market (TAM), Served Available Market (SAM) and the Served Obtainable Market (SOM), and how you’re going to get to them.

As a CEO, your success depends just as much on what others in your market do as what you do – and you have a lot less control over them.

4. The big one – creator of culture

As a CEO, how you behave is how everyone behaves. Culture travels top down.

And that can be a shock to some people. If you’re an accountant or lawyer, accustomed to saying no or looking for problems, you’ll need to change your mindset to one that is more visionary and that can talk about where you’re going and what the opportunities are.

The things you believe in – whether you should rule with fear, or motivate with incentives – will become policies and norms and standards.

The types of attitudes you have – to the way people dress, what you expect from people in the workplace, how understanding you are about the challenges working couples with children have – will find their way into your company.

Your company is you. And the people in there will start to act like you act. So, you must decide how best to act – all the time.

Not a tech CEO – just a CEO

When you go through this list, nothing really jumps out as specific to a tech CEO.

It’s just skills that you need to have as a CEO.

Perhaps you also need to have an understanding of tech – but it’s more important that you understand the people you have on your team that understand tech.

When it comes down to it, being a CEO is about being the company.

And you’re just got to try and be a good one.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Think About Sales Differently

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Friday, 12.30am

Sheffield, U.K.

Technically, it’s Saturday. But who’s checking.

Sometimes life feels like we’re walking around with blinkers on.

We can see what’s in front of us, what we’re told is there and the rest of the world is hidden from view.

And what this means is that we make a lot of assumptions about the way things are. We form theories and the think that those theories are real rather than what they really are – guesses about how the world works.

One such theory has to do with communication.

If you’re a communications engineer, the Shannon and Weaver model of communication is the one you start with – it’s even called the mother of all models.

In this model, if you want to get a message from a sender to a receiver, you encode the message, use a channel to deliver it, decode it at the other end and have it picked up by the receiver – with some noise injected along the way.

If you’ve ever done sales, have you been taught that your objective is to communicate your message clearly?

To say it in words that the prospect will understand? To show what you do? To have brochures and presentations and much more that will help you make a sale?

The idea is that you’re the sender of a message and you need to get that message across to the receiver without losing it along the way.

If the receiver doesn’t want to hear your message – well that’s an objection – and you need to handle it. You need to sell past the objection.

Or do you?

The Shannon and Weaver model has to do with machines. It has to do with the technical aspects of encoding a vibration into a microphone and sending it across the world to be played back on a radio.

It tells us little about how humans communicate.

We’re not machines. We don’t receive messages in that way.

But the engineering way of thinking is so simple, so seductive, so logical, that we’re fooled into thinking that’s the way it happens.

That’s because technology and engineering so dominate the world we live in that we think that’s the only way to look at it. Sometimes.

Sir Geoffrey Vickers tried to understand how the process of communication actually happened in society. How do we actually communicate with each other? How do we “attach meaning to communication”?

Not many people have listened to his stuff, but systems thinkers like Peter Checkland have – and created a model that we can use to think more clearly about this.

At the core of it is something called appreciative systems.

And you can summarise the whole thing in one sentence – but you’ll need to jump to the end of this post to get that.

Here’s the longer version.

We’re wrong when we think that logic will seal a deal, or that a product will sell itself, or that something is a no-brainer.

In reality, the decisions we make and the actions we take are because we want to maintain, modify or avoid having relationships with others.

We start with everything that happens in the world – the flux of events and ideas.

As people living in the world – we have interests and concerns. When faced with a situation, we perceive certain facts.

For example, if you are selling consulting services, you may perceive your value as being a skilled Excel modeller. That’s a fact.

You may select certain facts – like your Excel skills – and look for the significance of those facts in a relationship. You can create a wicked workbook – and that will help someone that has a complex mix of data that needs working out.

You come up with a hypothetical form of a relationship – perhaps it’s offering 30 days of consulting.

Maybe the client only wants 3 days – you select and settle on a form of relationship that is good enough.

Now, have you noticed the thing that’s happening as we work through this process?

Most of the time, we’re thinking of what we want, selecting the facts and forms of relationship that matter to us.

Many salespeople will be reluctant to learn anything about the prospect. Why waste their time on understanding someone else when they could be selling to five others?

What we need to do is start to appreciate what others want.

What are their existing norms and standards – how they expect the world to be?

What are their interests and concerns? What facts do they notice and select? What do those facts mean for their relationship with you?

What form of relationship would they put forward, and what are they likely to settle for?

If you can appreciate that, then you can help them work towards a decision on how to build a relationship with you.

That will lead to action.

And that leads to a sale.

A new norm and standard that includes you in the prospect’s life.

So… that’s a lot of theory to say something obvious. Perhaps.

Sometimes obvious things aren’t that easy to see – because we have existing concepts and ideas cluttering our brains.

You see most of us know the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But, thinking in terms of appreciative systems, involves a lot more appreciation of the other person.

And that gives you the platinum rule.

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

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Is The Shortest Path From A to B?

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Thursday, 9.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sometimes the best mental models are the simplest.

Take the challenge of starting a business, for example.

If you attend a startup conference or study for an MBA, you’ll be shown a process to follow.

At a startup conference, you’ll probably come across the Business Model Canvas and work through the various boxes on there, from your value proposition to the channels that you are going to use to get to your customer.

If you do an MBA, the modules that you study include accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, operations management. And a few others that, looking back, are more complex variants of these four.

So, do you need to do a business model to start a business? Or do an MBA to run one?

Having participated in the first approach and gone through the second – I’d say they are valuable experiences.

The theory you learn in an MBA can be applied during a startup experiment and it might actually help.

But the question I’m asking myself is – is it necessary?

To answer that, let’s turn to John D. Rockefeller.

His book, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, has a few gems in it. Nuggets that you should put in your pocket.

Starting with accounting – from the time he was a boy he kept a book keeping receipts and expenditures.

He called it Ledger A, and he writes that he was taught to give away a small amount of money regularly.

And that’s all you really need to know about accounting. Cash in. Cash out. And one needs to be more than the other.

If a business works at that level, it will work. If it needs a complicated accounting approach to make it work, you’re probably going to lose your shirt.

Human resources. Perhaps Warren Buffett can help.

He says – work with people you like, admire and trust.

Recruit for character and values – train for skills. Hire slowly and fire quickly.

How about operations management? The principle to use is KISS. Keep it simple.

Marketing? Marketing is about having conversations with people that have the power to sign a contract – the power to authorise payment to you.

Everyone else is just in the way.

People aren’t going to buy from you just because you want them to. They’ll buy because they want to. And if you somehow get them to buy against their will – they’ll feel rubbish about it and avoid you.

And no one gets rich on the first sale. It’s the second and third and fourth – the lifetime value of the customer – that makes you rich.

So the point of marketing and sales is not to sell.

It’s to introduce yourself, make people aware that you exist, not push for anything straight away or interfere with their current plans. Just let them know that you are available to serve them.

A slight digression on finance – and back to Rockefeller.

He tells a story where one friend asked another for advice on whether he should invest in cash or in Standard Oil stock. The person being asked didn’t want to answer – to put himself in a position where he was held responsible for the decision.

But the other was having none of it – and pressed for an opinion.

Finally the first one said – put half in cash and half in stock and see what happens.

In there is the secret to asset management – to wisely managing a portfolio of any kind.

If you don’t know – then go 50:50. Change that ratio only when you do know something.

Another sneaky little lesson. Does the rate at which you borrow matter?

No.

What matters is the return on how you invest your borrowed money.

Put it in projects that pay back in two years, and you can borrow money at 10% all day long.

All these little thoughts are mental models – models that can help you get from A to B in the quickest possible way.

In a straight line.

You can go to school to learn them. But you need to go to work to really learn them.

A lot of us spend a lot of time meandering about – zig zagging through C, D and E, before we realise that the straight route is the one to take.

The idea of going in a straight line is simple.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

How Do You Know Something Is Worth Doing?

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Tuesday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’ve tried todo lists, and they don’t work for me.

The lists of actions fill up faster than I can tick them off. Then, all of a sudden, I have fifteen pages of todos and no real plan for dealing with them.

And I think it would be a mistake to force myself to do them in order. Or rank them in some way. Or work out some kind of process for managing them.

Because that leads down a rabbit hole of list holders and Filofaxes and text files and apps and all that kind of stuff.

The kinds of tools and books and stationery that are everywhere, tempting you away from doing the work.

And they have a seductive siren song – if you use them you will get better, more productive, more beautiful, more sexy.

Maybe that works for some people.

I just know I’ve spent many hours thinking about how to do things rather than actually doing them.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Scott Fitzgerald once wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Maybe I can use that as an excuse…

So, on the one hand you have the idea of sharpening your axe. If you have an hour to cut down a tree, spend the first 50 minutes getting it sharp and then get to work.

On the other hand you have the school of long hours and hard work. The workplaces where facetime matters more than anything else.

Doesn’t matter if your axe is blunt – just get on with it and work harder.

Which is problematic. As Scott Adams writes, the reward for doing good work is usually more work.

Promotion doesn’t help. Robert Frost suggested that if you worked hard 8 hours a day you could eventually become a boss and work 12 hours a day.

For many of us, we should make better choices about what is worth doing. How should we spend our time?

Warren Buffett writes about how he constantly looks for ways to make large investments but tries to avoid small commitments.

Your time is the greatest asset you have and investing it wisely is the biggest job you have to do.

Should you be spending it on minor tasks or focusing it where you can make a big difference?

Buffett says – if something’s not worth doing at all, it’s not worth doing well.

For those of us that work as consultants or any other profession where our time is what makes us an income, this is crucial to learn.

There are lots of things that are important. Tasks that are important to us, and tasks that are important to others.

We’ll get satisfaction out of accomplishing important tasks. Others will only pay us if they believe that we can accomplish an important task for them.

But that’s not enough.

If we want to do things that move us closer to our goals, the tasks also need to be well defined.

We need to be clear on the shape and size of what we’re doing. We need to know how long we’ll do it and at what price.

With knowledge work, this can be hard.

But we need to get rid of the fuzziness and be clear on what we’re doing. That’s the only way to build a business instead of having a hobby.

The task for us is to try and spend our time in the zone – the magic zone – where the majority of what we do is both important and well-defined.

The rest is not worth doing at all.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Posted on

This Is The Simplest Strategy Model You’ll Need To Know

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Sunday, 10.23pm

Sheffield, U.K

What is it that makes a strategy succeed?

The way we answer this, often, is by looking back.

Why did Microsoft become what it is and dominate desktops around the world? Why are there enough Apple phones in the world for the entire population? And why is IBM still around?

Or, what makes one particular influencer popular? Why does a particular chef or singer or artist hit the big time?

Surely there are patterns we can find and copy to become successful ourselves?

But there is a problem with this. All too often, history is not a good guide. The path others took is a fragile one and sometimes crumbles away behind them.

What are your chances of starting a search engine that will compete with Google? Google has more computing power than you can imagine.

If you’re a grad student at University, what are your chances of raising the several billion needed to set up the next Google?

An article interviewing Professor Bala Balachandran has a useful way to think about your options.

Michael Porter once wrote that your have two ways in which you can stay profitable over time.

One – you can do activities different from your competitors.

Two – you can do activities differently.

Four words that stand out, two of which are the same, leaving you with three to ponder. So much packed into so little.

Porter’s emphasis was on different and differently.

Let’s say you’re in the web search business – going back to our previous example.

Bing and Yahoo are going head to head with Google. I’m not sure what’s happening with Yahoo, really, but Bing is funded by Microsoft and so has the financial muscle needed to compete with Google.

Three quarters of the world’s searches happen through Google. The others are trailing.

Because they’re doing the same activities the same way.

A minnow that some people use – although less than 1% – is duckduckgo.com. Because it does search differently.

While Google tracks everything you do and can tell you the sex of your unborn child, duckduckgo does the opposite – it sells you on how it protects your privacy.

But what’s the technology that will actually sink Google? Is it too far ahead?

Google is big. But is it bigger than the entire world? Perhaps the next Google will actually be a distributed search engine like yacy that runs on a few billion distributed computers in India and China?

Professor Balachandran steps away from Porter’s emphasis on difference and focuses on the word activities.

His point is that strategy is inseparable from the activities you do.

A strategy that does not involve action is navel gazing – no more than a dream.

And you can build a strategy around activities – whether different or differently.

This chimes with what Scott Adams says about how he became a cartoonist.

He says he was an average cartoonist, an average storyteller and knew a little about engineering.

When he put all three together, he created one of the most loved comics in the world.

Many people can do each of these three activities.

By combining them, Adams got a strategic advantage over everyone else out there.

This is a strategy that all of us can use.

Do different things – or do things differently.

That’s it.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh