Category: Rich Notes

Wednesday, 9.07pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. – Kurt Vonnegut

Every so often in a game of football you see a straightforward foot race. The ball is kicked forward and then there are just two players on the pitch. For a brief moment in time what happens next hinges on who gets there first.

I saw this moment play out again and again in a game today, between children, where the faster kid won out time after time.

Speed matters in football.

And it matters in other areas as well.

Take b2b marketing.

I recently tried posting more often on LinkedIn. I had some posts that got some traction. And some that didn’t. Some that felt well written. Some that were garbage.

Very quickly I found myself in an echo chamber. The same voices, commenting on the same things, turned up again and again. It’s like finding yourself trapped in a vortex, or maybe a tornado, with a surprised looking cow and you bouncing around the sides of the funnel.

If you do shout into the darkness you hear echoes.

If you are quiet, you still hear them, just different ones.

Drucker once said that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”.

I liked that definition, and it led to Drucker’s next point that only two activities: marketing and innovation helped achieve this purpose.

So, one might ask, what is the purpose of marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to start a conversation with a potential customer.

And where do conversations start?

The best ones probably start in bars. The second best ones from an introduction.

Not many start from cold calls. Probably none. I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has ever created real business from a cold call.

Yeah, they say they have. But I don’t know.

The value of a platform like LinkedIn is, on the surface, as a place to have business conversations.

Its real value is as a list of people doing jobs.

And some of those may be ones you can advertise to.

Consider two futures.

In one you start a posting habit and serve the algorithms to create content and build a following.

In another, you pay money to advertise to your target customers.

Which one do you think will work more quickly?

Which one will you choose?

Okay, that was a trick question. I learned from one of my children that you never choose.

You take both options. And some that aren’t on the table.

Take every chance you get. And be quick.

That’s the secret.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. – James Salter

Do you pay for any of the media you consume? I don’t. At least, not in the sense that I pay for the news. I pay for internet access and entertainment subscriptions, but I don’t get a newspaper. I used to read the Economist, for example. I even paid for it for a while. But now I don’t. Why is that?

The big technology firms have conditioned us to think everything is free. They’ve changed our behaviour. They’ve taught us that we don’t need to pay for things like news. We can simply tell each other what’s going on. Social media is gossip on a planetary scale.

At the same time, technology allows us to create more than ever. The number of journals and papers have exploded. There is more “thought leadership” being produced. We are incentivized to create more to serve the algorithm. We work to serve algorithms.dd

Why do we behave the way we do? Landsburg wrote in “The Armchair Economist”, “People respond to incentives. All else is commentary”. There are three incentives: pain, pleasure and effort. We try and avoid pain, seek pleasure and minimise effort.

It’s all about the high. The algorithm is carefully designed to dose you with pleasure and pain. Keep posting, and each like delivers a shot of dopamine – which gives you the same feelings as having a cigarette, alcohol or drug. The algorithm knows that you need an unpredictable dosage, so sometimes lots of exposures and likes to make you feel good, and sometimes low impressions to punish you – keep you oscillating between a state of “high” and “wanting more”. We are now increasingly digital media dopamine addicts.

The solution is to slow down and do hard things. Thinking is hard. Going for a run or exercising is hard. Swiping through posts on a phone is easy. We have to do more of the former, and less of the latter.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 8.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Automation is no longer just a problem for those working in manufacturing. Physical labor was replaced by robots; mental labor is going to be replaced by AI and software. – Andrew Yang

A month ago I started to use AI as a research assistant.

I used it to read long reports and give me a list of key points. I then read those points and selected the ones that looked interesting, wrapped them in posts and published them.

This is what I found.

1. AI doesn’t make boring stuff more interesting

Some of the reports were about important but dull things. What’s happening in the metals and minerals sector? How are hotels decarbonizing?

These topics matter, but if you’re going to read a post like that you’re probably already interested in the subject.

This showed up in the viewing statistics. The posts didn’t get too many views. There was some interaction but that was mostly from experts. And experts in what you do are not your target market.

I did notice on someone else’s post that a unwary end user talked about her experiences. She was promptly buried by an avalanche of sales requests.

2. It does make you, the writer, more informed

It’s funny how often someone would talk to me and ask a question related to something I had just written about using this process.

As a professional you need to be informed about what’s going on in your market whether you use AI or not.

Writing regularly forces you to look things up and that discipline is valuable.

3. Summaries are ok but detail is magic

AI summarises material but detail is what connects us to the idea.

In a recent post, for example, the AI summary was “reducing BIC Cristal barrel weight from 4.4g to 3.1g through value engineering”.

But I had to read the detail to learn that they did that by making the interior profile of the pen a hexagon to match the outside.

It was previously circular.

That detail is more interesting than the phrase “value engineering”.

Specific and concrete details matter and that leads to the next point.

4. AI is useless with well written work

Some books are a one sentence idea stretched over 40,000 tortured words.

Others are 5,000 carefully crafted sentences.

The first type of book is not worth summarising.

The second cannot be summarised.

AI’s true value may be in improving mediocre work so that it is at least average.

I think we quickly start to recognize the difference between manufactured words and human ones – there’s a sameness to the output, a ultraprocesed quality to the taste of the words that puts us off.

Of course, it’s going to get harder to tell the difference, just like a plant-based burger is really no better than a mean-based one.

There will be, I suspect, a flight to quality.

This happened to me with Kindle Unlimited. The idea of lots of books was great but you only found rubbish on the package while the good writers kept their books off and you still had to buy them.

People we already trust will get more of our business.

In commercial writing, however, the stuff you don’t read on websites for example – all that will be AI generated.

Because no one cares about that stuff.

5. Why do you write anyway?

I don’t know about you, but I write to think.

A first draft is me telling myself the story.

This is often rough and rambling. Most of it is rubbish.

But…

There’s a sentence or two that might be interesting. A fragment that makes it into a second draft. An idea that sparks a question that needs more research to answer.

You could spend time with a prompt engine to do this or you could just do the work because it’s interesting and because you want to understand it better.

The key point is that all this “stuff” has to make its way into your brain for it to be of any value.

You’re the consumer. And so you’re the most important person in the room.

Final thoughts

There are some tasks, like coding, where AI has changed everything.

Programming jobs are the easiest to automate because you don’t need a large team when a small team with AI can produce more and better code.

I don’t think AI is going away. I do think individuals and teams that use AI to help them create better work will do well.

People that try and simply use AI as a replacement for great people or teams will end up with mediocre and average results that will be ignored.

And, in today’s world, being ignored is the worst thing that can happen to your business.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Quality without results is pointless. Results without quality is boring. – Johan Cruyff

It’s amazing how quickly stopping a routine can derail you.

I’ve had a few weeks away from the keyboard. Away from a digital first approach. And there are pros and cons. Here are some.

The pros of getting away from the computer

You get to slow down. Experience the feeling of pen on paper. That leads to a different kind of thinking.

You can write rubbish, pour out anything on the page knowing that it won’t make it to the next edit. You get a chance to focus on what’s good.

You have a thing you can look back on, a real manuscript which may one day have historical value.

The cons

It’s slow. You need more time to get through the process. Writing it by hand first and then typing it up means you have more to do.

It’s locked on the page. If you move on, then it’s harder to come back and find where you were. A notebook is not searchable.

You don’t produce. Production is important. It’s too easy to see that there is extra work and move onto something else instead.

The fixes

I recently bought ‘On Quality’, a collection of Pirsig’s unpublished writings. He writes in there that all methods have problems. If you just write, it’s rambling. If you use an outline, it’s dull. If you add some excitement, then it’s artificial.

The answer is to just add quality, just make it good.

If only it were just that easy.

The real thing that matters is to get something out. Quality comes from working on that again and again.

Pirsig’s book ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ took 6 years to get out. 2 to write. Then 2 to be depressed about it. Then 2 more to write it again.

But what mattered was the writing.

I need to remind myself of that every once in a while.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.10pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing. – Marjane Satrapi

What is the point of a blog?

I started thinking of it as a place to showcase my work – to display what I knew , to prove to others that I did know something.

I learned, as I wrote, that I had more to learn, and what I knew I began to question.

I wrote in paragraphs, then in sentences, and later in paragraphs again.

I wrote ponderous prose, then simple words, then elaborate constructions once again.

I whined about writing in some posts, and crafted reasonably complete essays in others.

I imagined that what I wrote would be the way the world saw me. I later realised that everyone is busy and no one is looking.

I learned that your blog is a place where you can work on what interests you. It’s a place to learn. It’s a place to practice. It’s like working in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the biggest coffee shop on Earth. You’re surrounded by people, but you can also be alone and focus on your work.

And I do need to get on with work.

I have to produce a thesis in a couple of years, and there is lots of reading and thinking I need to do.

John McPhee writes about the difficulty of getting started with writing. Say you need to write about a bear. You start by writing to your mother. First, you write about how hard it is to write. You complain about the topic. You ask why you chose bears in the first place. You mention the bear has a 30 inch neck and could keep pace with a horse. And then you delete all the whining and leave the bit about the bear.

If you are reading these words, or the next few hundred thousand, I apologize now. They will follow McPhee’s advice, although with the unnecessary stuff left in until I get around to the edit.

I need to work out ideas, and the way to work out ideas is to talk about those ideas and to think about what other people have said. This blog is my place to work out those ideas. And sometimes, those ideas will be half done and I will run out of time and have to stop.

So where am I right now in the production of this thesis?

The topic I’m working on seems laughably general and terribly important at the same time.

I’m interested in how to make better choices. It’s one thing doing that as an individual, and a whole other thing doing it as a group. The research question that I’ve backed into is how to work better in groups.

A rabbit hole that I’ve gone down recently is the phenomenon of a “writer’s room”. This is a thing in Hollywood. And it’s something that I need to understand.

The writer’s room is a workplace tradition that creates a space in which a group of writers collectively author television scripts (Henderson, 2011).

Okay, so I’m out of time. One of the things about this phase of the blog is that when I need to stop, I will, and carry on another day.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 7.27pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. – Lao Tzu

I am, by nature, quite frugal. I am also, by training, not very materialistic. This is a good and a bad thing.

I remember reading a comment written a few hundred years ago by a colonist in India that talked of the danger of buying into the ascetic mindset that is part of that country’s history. It leads to a passive acceptance of the present, the writer railed, and it is through consumption and the purchase of goods that the economy is lifted and growth happens.

This, I fear, happens to be true.

The wealthiest countries are the ones that have the most trade, where money changes hands and people create products and services in exchange for money. People who don’t need or don’t want many products and services are like grit in the machine, slowing down the engine of commerce and wealth creation.

At the same time the amount of resources we process to meet the needs of those who do want those products and services keeps growing. As people become wealthier, they consumer more resources.

One solution I see out there is called degrowth. I don’t know the details, but I know I like the idea. If I were a betting person, however, I would not bet on it becoming reality.

Why is that?

Because. People.

What happens when a population stops developing? Stops changing?

It stagnates. Isolated tribes may have complex social structures, beautiful ceremonies, stories passed down through generations, and have lived in peace on the land for centuries.

It still doesn’t stop powerful modern tribes with modern weapons taking over their land and driving them out.

I find it hard to imagine a peaceful Earth where all the people live together in peace and security.

I find it much easier to imagine a constant state of tension, where power is a constant threat, and being prepared with balancing power is the only way to ensure one’s security.

And to be prepared you need resources. To gain resources you need money. And to get money you need to have individual productive capability harnessed in a group economy. A society of monks can function very well. Until a Henry VIII comes along.

Society needs people who care about stuff and want stuff to move the economic machine every day. Society also needs people who build the systems that make that stuff. Society also needs people who think about how to make that system better, and move to products that meet people’s needs while reducing the impact they have on the environment through better and more thoughtful design. Society even needs people who sit on the sidelines and simply enjoy living.

I don’t really know where this train of thought is going. I think we need to make more thoughtful choices about what we do and what we buy. It’s probably sensible to learn how to live with less. Jobs in the future may be hard to come by. And I know what I’m talking about here because my work often ends up creating jobs. 20 years ago, it might have been thirty new jobs. 10 years ago, it was four. Now, well… you don’t really need employees if you’re starting a business. Things are changing fast.

For us, I think asking what is the least we need to do our thing is a useful way to check the value we can add in this changing society.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 8.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality. – Orson Bean

I’ve just paid for my next year of study and realised, with some surprise, that I’m in the fourth year of working towards a PhD. This level of study isn’t like previous levels, where there are set courses and requirements. I’m doing this because I want to, and the value is in what happens over time, not the degree itself.

A strange thing happens when you look at a thing over a number of years. At first it seems simple. Then it gets more and more complex the more you look at it. And then, it gets simple again, but in a different way. In a more fundamental, visceral way.

Let me try and explain this.

I used to think I was a good writer. I could write better than the people around me. I could create words quickly. I used to write a lot of proposals for business – 20, 30,000 words of material, fat 70-page documents. People seemed pleased. Clearly this stuff was valuable. Half an inch of paper – clearly we were solid, experienced people.

A few years later we met some lawyers. They talked to us and then sent us a four page proposal. The first page was a letter thanking us for asking for a proposal. The second page was a bulleted list of what they would do. The third and fourth pages had prices and some terms and conditions. And that was it.

Here I was decimating a small forest each time I had to write something and here were these lawyers sending in a four-page note. Clearly one of us was more efficient, and I decided from that day on to write short-form proposals all the time.

Of course, not everyone around you will think that is a good idea. If they happen to be your boss, then you will be told it’s a bad idea and that you need to get on and write the big proposal. So you will.

Now, you spend time doing big proposals and feeling resentful, and doing short ones and winning business, and overall you’ve still got a lot of work to do. But over time you realise that winning feels good, and winning gets noticed, and people see the connection between the time spent on a short, focused proposal versus a rambling one that doesn’t get the business and then after a few years, you’re exclusively doing what works.

So the journey goes from learning how to get good at writing words to learning how to get good at selling with words. The same thing, but different.

Research is something like that. I watched the final lecture by Peter Checkland, the academic giant in my research field, and I was struck by the simplicity of his message. He spent his career working in that area of real-world situations that people consider problematical, and thought about ways in which people could work together to improve that situation. It’s hard to think of a more common use case in daily life, or a more important one. Given the challenges we face in society, what could be more relevant than coming up with better ways to work together to address them? This is more than product development, more than selling, more than capital allocation. It is about making good choices.

When I started my programme of research, I was interested in making good choices.

I still am.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. – Abraham Lincoln

Doug Lisle is a psychologist that I like listening to, first because he uses cartoons to illustrate his talks rather than boring slides, and second because what he says is interesting.

Lisle’s position on psychology appears to be that it’s all biology. I don’t think he seems to think much about the whole ego and id sort of thing. I really don’t know enough to have an opinion on the field, but for someone with an engineering background, a lot the old psychology stuff seems – well – made up. I remember reading some books in the field years ago and it was all, “well he said this” and then “she said this about what he said”, and my logical positivist engineering brain was going “why are people doing so much talking rather than just looking at the data?”

At the time, you didn’t have the data because you couldn’t look in people’s brains. And now that you can, it’s still not entirely clear why we think the way we do. For example, what can neurons firing in the brain tell us about poetry? Can you find a poetry circuit? Or a painting one? Probably. It’s like Pirsig writes about a novel and a computer – where, when you examine the circuits – is the novel.

Right, let’s back up. The thing about Lisle is that he doesn’t need the psychology to explain why we act the way we do. It’s biology. And a bit of economics. We make decisions to act for three reasons: to gain pleasure; to avoid pain; and to minimise effort. These are the reasons to act that kept us alive. And they’re also the reason why we’re in trouble these days because the easiest thing to do is often the worst thing to do in a world of abundance. Think TV and chocolate. A steady diet of those two is going to end badly.

Let’s look at the pleasure motivation in a little more detail. The obvious reason to pursue pleasure is the payoff in a relationship. But as social animals, pleasure is more than just that. One quite important type of pleasure comes from esteem. Lyle says we all have little esteem meters in our heads. We’re constantly making decisions based on whether the choice we make will increase or lower our esteem in the eyes of those around us.

How does this apply to the world we live in. Well, if you’re someone that wants to build a business, then you need people to pay attention to you. One way of doing that is to demonstrate how clever you are. You can do that by going on LinkedIn and putting out posts that show how knowledgable you are. You can call people out who are wrong, and tell them why they’re stupid. And if you do that consistently you’ll find that people respect you and look up to you and start following you.

Or will they? My reaction is more on the lines of … what a p****.

I know a few people like this, and they don’t come across as wise and helpful. They come across as cantankerous grumps. And not the kind of lovable grump that really has a heart of gold. This is the kind of grump that your kids are scared of asking for their ball back. The kind you cross the road to avoid, or pretend you don’t see because you don’t really want another conversation on why the world is going to hell in a shopping bag.

A more reliable way to get people to like you is to look for ways to raise their esteem levels. You can do this by sharing what they do, or commenting about what you liked about what they did. Lincoln may have thought that he was alone in desiring esteem, but as social animals that desire is hardwired into us. Esteem matters.

It’s not hard really. If you want to work with someone, figure out how what you do will raise their esteem levels.

Or, as Zig Ziglar (what a name!) said much more succinctly than this post, “you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. – Peter Drucker

I am not an academic. Yes I’m working on a PhD, but I’m not sure I’m doing a great job at that. Or perhaps I’m doing it the way I do things, by bumbling around and following things that are interesting. When I’ve done that in the past, something happens next. And sometimes that something is unexpected.

Here’s the thing. I am spending a huge amount of time – and I mean really quite huge – trying to understand what happens when people talk in a group about a situation they find problematic.

I watched a talk by Robert Pirsig recently where he said that everyone’s situation is different and the problems they have are unique. But in another way, everyone’s situation is the same and we all have the same problems. It all depends on how much we know about the situation we’re in right now.

I see this all the time. I don’t know what your particular situation is and what you’re finding problematic. If I listen to you and take notes I’ll learn about how you see that situation and understand the constraints and challenges you’re facing. As we talk, I’ll learn about what you’re already tried, what worked and what didn’t, and we’ll figure out what to try next. This is always going to be something unique to you.

At the same time this is a process that I’ve done hundreds of times now. Your situation has a history, now is because of what happened before. The current moment has actors and relationships and beliefs. And there are possible futures, which will be activated by agreements between all of us. A past, present and future. That’s always going to be the same.

This activity is a kind of research. A research based in action. The idea is that we think about what to do. Then we take action. Then we reflect on what’s happened, learn from it, and then plan and take new action.

Some people think this isn’t research, it isn’t science. Come on now. So you do something. Then you write about it. Then you do something else. And you say it’s science? No. This thing you’re doing isn’t replicable. Once you’ve done it, it’s done. No one else can do it again. You can’t step in the same river twice.

Ah, I say. You’re right, you can’t step in the same river twice. But you can get wet. You can get washed away, or make it safely to the other side.

Is this too abstract? Let’s make it concrete. The tools of “real” science are quantitative – numbers, figures, calculations. Go into any situation, any real situation, and use numbers to calculate what you think people should do. Then tell them and see how they react.

They will react with feelings. They will not react with cold, rational responses. They will instead, using the language of transactional analysis, have warm fuzzies or cold pricklies. Your maths will not carry the day. Your audience’s feelings will.

This has been a hard thing to learn. We imagine we can control things through logic. But that part of our brain is quite recent and requires a lot of training. A few people can respond that way. Most people use that other part of the brain, the deeper one, the one that responds to a tiger by running away rather than counting its stripes. Any method you use to work with people has to work with their feelings rather than trying to eliminate them.

Perhaps the real value in a meeting is to get people to tap into their feelings about the situation and possible courses of action, using those feelings as a guide to come to an agreement on the next thing to do. And this is not hard to do – just get people talking and those feelings will come out in their chatter.

All you have to do is listen, ask questions and take notes.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding – Leonardo da Vinci

In the last few posts I talked around this idea of getting people in a virtual room and having a conversation, and how I take notes to help record and structure what we talk about.

What’s the point of doing that? How does it help?

Three reasons come to mind.