Category: Rich Notes

Friday, 8.41pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. – Alexander Graham Bell

The world is a complicated place. So how do we make sense of what we see happening around us? How do we operate businesses, institutions, and systems in a world of flux and change? In a world of hypercomplexity?

I don’t know about you but I find the pace of change seems to be exceeding recommended speed limits.

Whether it’s the dismantling of political systems or the daily advance of AI tooling things are happening too quickly to comprehend.

Systems thinking is one of the few fields that can make sense of situations and intervene with an understanding of the technology, culture and politics that affects what is going on

The Systemist is the journal of the UK systems society and, in its Summer 2024 issue, observes that new and better methodologies are not much use if there aren’t people who can understand, select and use them in the real world.

The reason for this is because the field is new and the scholarship is still primitive (Checkland, 1992).

It’s new, Checkland argues, in the sense that the origins of systems thinking go back to 1948, a mere 77 years, which is nothing compared to the 2000 years or more that the Western intellectual tradition has developed over.

But what exactly is lacking in scholarship – what does it mean to be scholarly?

A scholarly approach is one that tries to eliminate intellectual confusion.

I read somewhere that good writing does not seek to be understood, it seeks to not be misunderstood.

The confusion in the systems field includes: how systems ideas are presented; the difference between reality (ontology) and how we study it (epistemology); and what people want systems thinking to be and what it is.

Checkland’s paper makes one vitally important point.

There was a time that people believed that there was a way to communicate between different scientific fields – that there was a “Unity of Science”.

It was a hope that speakers of different languages could talk in a single general language and then translate their findings back into their own languages.

That doesn’t work.

General solutions do not work. As Checkland writes, “You pay for generality with lack of content”, and quotes Ken Boulding who said, “All we can say about practically everything is almost nothing.”

The real power of Systems thinking is when you have a real-world problem – something you care about and want to do something about.

And thinking and writing clearly about that problem and how you approached it is the way we become more scholarly.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Checkland, P., 1992. Systems and Scholarship: The Need to Do Better. The Journal of the Operational Research Society 43, 1023–1030. https://doi.org/10.2307/2584098

Sunday, 9.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. – James K. Polk

I watched a WW2 government film warning people about fascists and how they gain power.

It’s a simple technique – create an enemy for your followers to hate.

If you haven’t seen the Disney film “Wicked” yet, spoiler alert.

It’s about creating an enemy to bring your followers together.

It’s one of the oldest plays in the political handbook and it’s used in country after country because it’s so easy to deploy.

It’s quite difficult to run a government that works for everyone.

In Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, the author writes about the different character of kingdoms. Those with a more military disposition were “mere standing camps”, without the buildings and civil works in kingdoms with a priesthood.

The challenge, however, is that as a kingdom focuses its resources on buildings its civil institutions and less on its soldiers it also becomes weaker and less able to repel invasion.

Times have changed since then and wars are fought between economies and between supply chains.

Although that may only be in theory. The Ukraine war is being fought in a “modern, yet archaically brutal battlefield“.

The WW2 film is worth watching because it shows you so clearly what happens when a country starts sliding in the wrong direction.

First, it starts with blaming a set of minorities for everything that’s wrong with what’s going on.

The majority, listening, take a step back from the minorities, distancing themselves.

Until the it turns out that some of them are also minorities that are being targeted.

Politicians win when they can divide and conquer.

When they have the power to introduce regressive policies.

There are only two responses.

One is conflict – the minorities have to organise and take action.

The other is progressive. Where the majority act to protect the minority.

It is possible that we now live, unfortunately, in interesting times.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If something is not worth doing at all, it’s not worth doing well. – Charlie Munger

The world is frenetic right now.

We have access to more information than ever, but learn very little.

That’s because we see the same two or three things over and over again on the platforms we use.

And it can seem like there’s nothing else that’s important.

It’s time to try and switch off.

But how do you do that?

I started with https://clew.se. This is a one-person donation supported search engine that indexes “writing by independent creators”.

You can always find something interesting to read there written by a real person.

Another strategy is to delete everything – to do less – as little as possible.

This is quite hard, as most of us take on obligations without really considering the full costs of doing so.

We all have scarce resources and must use them for the most good.

It is really quite important to read the Charlie Munger quote above and take a long hard look at whether something is worth doing at all.

If you’re developing software, are those functions worth doing?

If you run a business, are those jobs worth doing?

There is no point making something work well when it should not be done at all.

My bugbear on this is tidying up.

If you don’t have a thing you don’t need to tidy it away.

Just have less stuff.

And by that, I mean have less physical stuff, less digital stuff, less mental stuff.

Life will be simpler.

Finally, the Munger quote leads back to the 1994 shareholder letter by Warren Buffett.

In that, he has these lines, which are as relevant now as they were 31 years ago.

“We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen.”

We have no idea whether AI will change the world, whether there will be political unrest in one corner or the other, or catastrophic climate change this year or in the next decade.

What we can do is manage our business prudently and with an eye to the risks coming our way.

Don’t buy a house or start a business in a flood plain unless you have tiled flooring, for example.

It’s probably more important than ever that we make decisions on sound fundamental principles rather than reacting to short term noise.

In short, keep plodding on.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 7.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We have the best government that money can buy. – Mark Twain

A paper popped up on my feed today. Kim et al (2024). Strategies of Political Control and Regime Survival in Autocracies.

How do autocracies stay in power?

They use 6 strategies, two repressive, two co-optative, and two indoctrinal.

They can put you in prison, and take away your right to protest or participate in the political process.

They can give you jobs and incentives that make it harder for you to oppose the status quo.

And they can use the media and education to tell people, especially children, what to think.

A lot of places have had autocracies – 103 countries, and 209 regimes in the research.

It’s tempting to look around the world today and see the spectre of autocracy in the politics of the day.

But is that the case?

What do the papers think?

Let’s take the two most important countries around now. The U.S and China. Where are they headed?

The Economist seems split on two thoughts.

The first is that America is doing well and will do better.

It has resources, technology, money… and innovation.

The other is that this might happen inspite of the new administration’s plans.

Take tariffs, for example. The administration argues that they will bring jobs home but instead what they will do is increase prices for consumers.

Laptop prices, for example, might go up 25%.

Looking at the news, coffee will too.

China seems to be in for a more difficult run, but no one is supposed to mention it.

It grew 5% in 2024 – hitting its target.

Although some people found that hard to believe.

Household borrowing is low, property prices are falling and stock markets are anaemic.

Sometimes, if the numbers aren’t what you want them to be, it just means you haven’t done the analysis right.

The things people vote for, if they have a choice, may not be the things they want.

Higher prices, fewer people to do the dirty jobs, and a widening gulf between the have and have nots won’t be fixed easily.

I find it interesting that the papers have stories about computing and history side by side.

On the one side they talk about AI and its promises, or failures.

On the other side they talk about capital and labour and what has happened in the past.

Here’s what I took away.

A system that does not pay people well is one that prioritises profit over society – and the logical consequence is that business will organise itself so that it makes the most money for the lowest cost.

And that’s why manufacturing takes place in low wage countries.

It’s not going to shift back to high-wage countries unless the tariffs are big enough to force it, but of course that raises the price of goods which makes people unhappy.

Apart from the ones with the higher wages.

What we are watching is the imposition of ideology, a top down attempt to reshape how things work.

Which runs counter to the core of thinking, in the US anyway, which is to get out of the way and let people get on with doing what’s in their best interests.

Perhaps the best way to look at the rest of this decade is to remember the old saying.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 8.10pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life. – Mary Kay Ash

I’ve had a few conversations the last few weeks that have got me thinking about sales.

Sales… what does that mean to you?

I wrote a post last year about how we all dance for someone. It might be a boss, a customer – it’s hard to think of someone that isn’t working for someone else.

Those who aren’t fall into one of two camps: they are rich enough not to; or they haven’t learned how to sell.

You sell yourself into a job, you sell your company into a contract, and you sell your partner on committing to you.

Sales matters, it’s what makes it possible to make money and live a life.

When we start a career we don’t know how important sales are – we send out hundreds of CVs, wait to be selected – and perhaps don’t realise that if we get through to an interview you’re really going to a sales pitch.

When you’ve been in a job for a while and then start looking around for a new one it’s easy to forget that you’re starting a sales process again.

If you’ve been selling yourself for a while then maybe you’ve forgotten just how long it took you to learn these skills that you now take for granted.

So, in order to do good work you first need to sell yourself as the person who can do the work.

But, before you can sell you have to get the chance to do so.

How do you get the chance to go in front of someone and pitch what you do?

Cold calling? Marketing? Tendering?

All these methods work for different organisations in different ways. Cold calling is a thankless enterprise but it gets results if you’re willing to play the odds. As does marketing and respond to tenders.

But the single most useful tool for anyone starting a business or looking for a job is a referral.

If someone introduces you to someone that you might be able to help that’s the best way to cross the chasm – to get across the gap between you and a customer.

This isn’t new information – of course – referral based approaches have been around for centuries.

That’s how most religions took off.

More practically, however, if you run a business the best thing you can do if you want to talk to customers is get some help.

You’ve probably got someone in your contact book who is a connector – who knows everyone.

Those connectors have spent time building their connections and their network – and that has value.

Value that’s worth paying for.

If you’re starting a business now, especially one based on knowledge and skills, put an incentive program in place for referrals – pay your introducer well if their introduction leads to a contract.

And if you’re a connector, team up with a business that needs your help.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.40pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The two big startup killers are when there’s just no market for what you are doing, and team problems. – David Cohen

Most ventures fail.

Many people think that successful founders are young – they’re the ones that are smart, know new technology, don’t have commitments, can outwork the competition and can think outside the box.

It turns out, however, that older founders are more likely to be successful. A 50-year old founder is nearly twice as likely to create a higher growth firm than a 30-year old.

This is good news for those of us that are growing irritatingly older.

People often think that what matters in a business is getting to product-market fit.

You have a great idea – perhaps it’s a new app that helps you manage your aquarium.

The next step is to build the app.

Then it’s time to go and find paying users.

This is the way we often do things when we’re young.

I remember building all kinds of tools that I thought would be immensely useful.

But somehow no one else wanted to use them, and they never got the traction I thought they might get.

As you get older you realise that you need to think about the problem in reverse – what you need is market-product fit.

Go and find a need – something people want that they’re not getting now – something they would pay for, preferably a lot.

Then build a product that fits that need.

Now, you might argue that if it were that easy surely everyone would be doing it.

Well, think about this for a minute.

Who is your competition?

On the one hand, you have young founders who don’t know what they are doing yet and are busy building rather than looking at the same market need that you’ve discovered.

On the other hand there are large companies that could meet that need – once they’ve got the budget approval, nod from legal, IT setup – all the things that hobble you in a big, rich enterprise from moving quickly.

You could build your product in the time the large enterprise gets its first white paper in front of a VP.

A low risk strategy for a founder, especially an older one, is perhaps as follows.

1. Go and talk to the market. Find a need that you can fill.
2. Build a solution and get early customers.
3. Iterate and build until you have something that delights your small customer base.
4. Grow quickly, hire and build a team that can support your service.
5. Put yourself up for sale – look for a large company that wants what you have and will acquire the lot.

This is a 3-5 year plan, and then if you have time, rinse and repeat.

So, if you’re on the wrong side of 40, your best years are still ahead of you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

My news sources for a few years, perhaps even for the last half a decade, have been the BBC and CNN.

And whatever turns up on social media.

I was quite excited, then, to discover that the library made it possible to read newspapers from around the world.

I thought I’d get thoughtful, interesting, and balanced information from experienced journalists.

There is a lot of that.

And then there is stuff that makes you think.

Take the Wall Street Journal. You’d think that it’s going to focus on business, tell you what you need to know.

And it does. I shouldn’t be unfair. There are a number of excellent articles.

And then there are some downright bizarre opinion pieces, the sort of stuff you’d normally see on social media rather than in a reputable paper.

Quite a lot of them are angry about the renewables business – and the shift away from gas.

The argument goes something like this – renewables need lots of minerals, that’s a lot of mining, plus they get subsidies so they are bad and we should keep burning gas.

Which sounds reasonable, except that there’s no balance to the opinion.

Presumably the gas infrastructure was built with lots of subsidies and it still gets them.

Yes mining is bad. So is climate change.

The bad news is that if we really want to do something we need to stop consuming so much and live within planetary resources.

But that’s tricky because the reason we can make such powerful and sophisticated weapons is because the economies with the capability are rich because their consumers make and buy the kind of things that require powerful and sophisticated technology.

An agrarian society that is happy growing rice is going to be good for the environment – but will also struggle to defend itself.

These are complicated areas where it’s hard to figure out what to do and I suppose these baying opinion pieces are shouting about what they think is needed.

The reaction from government is to do what will get people to vote for them, and that acts as something of a check mechanism. Go too far one way and you’ll alienate everyone else.

You can get in power by being extreme. Staying in power, in a democracy anyway, requires compromise.

The extreme nature of social media and political discourse suggests that compromise is never an option.

In public anyway.

Away from scrutiny, the people that matter probably get on with making deals, and those deals rely on hammering out a compromise.

That’s the way the world really works.

And if anything is going to make things better, it’s continuing to work towards finding a compromise between competing priorities.

At least, while I’m reading this news and wondering what I’m getting out of it, I’m also strolling along on a treadmill.

The world might be complicated, but targeting calories needn’t be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. – Leo Tolstoy

I’ve been enjoying reading newspapers again.

If you had told me 20 years ago that I would read a lot, then get to a point where I simply looked at lots of small articles lined up like cards, and rarely read a long-form article I would have thought you were nuts.

But that’s what’s happened. We’ve gone from making time to read to “consuming” content.

It’s time to slow down. Like the slow food movement, perhaps we should get back into slow reading.

And thinking about what we’ve read.

I have spent a lot of time over the last year or so thinking about AI.

It’s professionally important to me. Could AI do what I do? Could it help me do what I do better? It seems like my areas of competence – which centre around decision making and the sustainable transition, with a bit of technology thrown in, are affected by, and are relevant to the development of AI.

For example, I have spent much of the last couple of decades immersed in power markets. Power prices are set by supply and demand in deregulated markets. AI is power hungry and there is an explosion in data centers that will use a lot more power than current ones – which means there is a need for new connections, new contracts, and potentially price spikes in wholesale power prices.

Of course, you can build renewable generation near your data center – and there are strategies to mitigate the risks – but the point I’m making is that power is important.

The growth area in the last year has been in building and kitting out data centres to support the use of these new LLM models. That means lots of chips to run the models and big server farms to handle the global demand. ChatGPT runs very fast – much faster than the local LLM on my computer – because it runs on more computers.

Cooling those computers requires power and water – and we’re back to the resource requirements.

But really, all we have so far, is the equivalent of picks and shovels – where’s the gold?

Well, that’s the next thing to figure out. Which companies are going to make more money – either through increased revenues or decreased costs through the use of AI?

This is actually much harder to do than you think.

I think I’ve written about this before, but the savings from an improved process often go to the supplier, rather than the customer.

For example, will you really save money using ChatGPT?

OpenAI has already talked about how it wants to take a share of the savings made by firms using its technology.

A few months ago, I could use the tool and get a useful answer. I could show people how useful it was.

In my most recent tests, it’s searched the web and given me less useful information – almost like it’s teasing me and saying I do know something but you’re going to have to pay more to find out.

That creates friction – and increases costs.

This next stage is the really hard bit and I don’t think many companies are going to get this right.

On the one hand, you have a flaky technology – with its makers trying to figure out how to make money from it.

It’s like having a shovel that randomly turns into ice cream while you’re trying to use it.

On the other hand, you have to figure out what the value proposition really is – all too often we don’t care about what we get. AI writing, for example, isn’t the kind of stuff you’re dying to read. Instead it’s the stuff you submit for a term paper because you can’t be bothered to do the reading.

Are you really going to pay for that sort of output?

Have you seen anything produced by AI that you would pay a premium for?

I don’t know how things are going to turn out, but that’s what makes things interesting.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 6.42pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached. – Gottfried Leibniz

In a post a couple of days back I asked how we would go about starting to analyse situations.

That got me doing a little reading.

In a paper, which is now 15 years sold, Libertatore and Luo (2010) discuss the implications of the Analytics movement for Operational Research.

Analytics, at the time, was a new term doing the rounds.

I remember being introduced to tools such as PowerBi around 2012 with the advent of cloud computing and software as a service (SAAS) applications.

I didn’t like the idea – but I could see how it would sell.

The paper argues that four big driving forces led to the analytics movement.

I’ve adapted their picture above, as I think the order I experienced is slightly different, so I’m going to discuss it from that perspective.

The first change is that of a process orientation. Things happen. Then other things happen. And these happenings over time result in value for customers.

Managing many operations these days, especially those in information businesses, are about managing processes.

This is different from innovation and research and new ideas.

For example, quantum computing is a hot topic right now. In the West it’s driven by a combination of private investment, university research and the ever-present military interest.

In the East, it’s driven by state investment.

Once you have something promising emerging from research, making it happen in practice is a process problem.

And I’m interested in those practical businesses in this post.

The changing view from stand alone products to processes has a natural fit with the changing ecosystem of data.

We might have once thought of data as a silo, a set of complete information.

Now, we know that we have data sets that keep growing, databases of daily stock prices, weather changes, flooding events, e-commerce purchases – the river of data is constantly flowing and replenished.

But to really use data in a process view what you need is software – and we are awash in software now.

When it comes to open source and free software there is a huge amount of choice – starting with r and python packages that can pretty much do anything you want.

And we now also have people in organisations who understand these things, that have grown up with these tools.

More importantly, those people are in charge – in management roles and in a position to understand how to use these tools in practice.

Knowing how to do analysis is increasingly important for organisations – and they will probably start hiring more and more analysts – people that have the skills needed to work with computers and data.

But, the most important thing they will be doing is applying those capabilities to build better and cheaper processes.

There is a saying in product firms that companies don’t compete, supply chains do.

In information businesses, we could change that to it’s not smart people in consultancies that are competing, it’s the processes they’ve implemented.

The better your process, those likely you are to win.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’m actually writing history. It isn’t what you’d call big history. I don’t write about presidents and generals… I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country. – Louis L’Amour

Did you hear Trump talk about buying Greenland from Denmark and merging with Canada and wonder what was going on?

I spent some time today away from social media.

A few months back I think I wrote about how I thought social media was a useful source of insight – how people looked for interesting things and shared them with you and the result was like having a team of researchers making sure you knew what was going on.

I’m less sure of that now.

There is probably some useful stuff but because the algorithm shows you what you’re interested in that means after a while you’re not seeing anything new.

That happened very quickly. It took around two months of writing and engaging before it was clear I was in an echo chamber.

So I stopped.

The problem is that once you cut off the information hosepipe you’ve been drinking from, how do you know what’s going on?

It’s a complicated world out there so how do you make informed decisions for yourself and your business?

I started by going back to the library.

UK cities have good library facilities for citizens and one of the benefits of paying a council tax is access to a good e-library which lets you borrow newspapers.

Like the Economist. I used to read the Economist every day. I had a subscription for a while. But then, as free sources of news came along, those habits slipped away.

But 2025 promises to be a year where shutting your eyes is not a good idea.

I borrowed a few papers and started reading. And, for the first time in a decade, started clipping articles out of the paper.

Well, using a snipping tool on the computer and saving them, that is.

It feels like an old fashioned thing to do – to clip an article.

I have a book in my library about the Mitrokhin Archives – about secret KGB operations between the 1930s and 1980s.

I picked it up in a second hand book store, mainly because within the pages the former owner had clipped and stored news stories about spies.

I clipped a story from the Economist about the economics of the Arctic, and learned that Greenland has the biggest deposits of rare earths, nickel and cobalt in the West.

Canada is also home to huge reserves of iron ore, has the largest coastline around, with access to the seas around the Arctic.

These materials are important to the West because the biggest reserves of minerals essential for batteries are in China.

And you know there are some tensions going on there.

Modern armies need technology, that technology needs these minerals.

As an aside, we also need them for green energy technologies.

So, wanting to control the places where these are found starts to make sense.

I think my resolution now, for 2025, is a simple one.

Try and be better informed.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh