Category: Service Business

Friday, 9.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. – Edward Everett Hale

What’s going to make you stand out?

It looks like AI is going to take over the world. We seem to see new capabilities every day. It can write better than we can, make better poems, draw better pictures, create better videos and do everything faster.

Or can it?

I think we’re still trying to work out our relationship with this new machine. And perhaps the way to think about it is consider our relationships with earlier machines.

The car made the horse irrelevant but it didn’t remove the need for transport.

By making it easier to travel we ended up travelling more – but did that result in a better situation?

Define better?

It’s better in that you can drive further in a day than you ever could before.

But it’s also resulted in commuting, something that will ruin your health as you sit for hours every day and snack on chocolate and crisps.

Technology makes things different. And different does not mean better.

What we’re already seeing is a lot of auto-generated rubbish.

And it really is unreadable, some of this stuff, generic and vanilla and just plain boring.

Now that will change. The algorithms will work out what we pay attention to and fine tune content so that we’re drawn to keep consuming it.

But while it’s doing that you have time to react. And what you’ve got to do is lean into the “human” bits of what you do.

Here’s the thing. The only thing that’s worthwhile doing is providing a human with something to do.

Give someone a good story, a great experience, a thing they love.

I know that when I read something from a real person that I like it makes me feel good.

And when I read something good that has a whiff of AI generated stuff I feel a little cheated, a little like my trust has been violated.

I wanted to connect with you – not have a machine play with my neural circuitry and make me respond in the way it wanted.

No one likes being manipulated.

But we all like to connect and experience something real.

How should you respond?

I think technology is often a good thing. AI can help. It should definitely be part of your workflow and you should try and see how it can help you do better work.

But you’ve got to remember that in many cases there’s a person that you’re trying to connect with.

In 2024, if you want to succeed, one way is to make your service as personal as possible.

How do you do that?

There are three things to think about.

First, what is it about the way you do things that is inimitable – that’s hard to copy?

For me it’s the hand made approach to thinking that I use. It’s simple, a pencil and paper, doodles to work through ideas. The kind of thing that is literally generated by my body.

You can do it, but you’ll do it differently. An AI can do something but I’m not sure what without a brain to connect with it.

Second, make stuff people like. Make things for people. Don’t just create “content”. Create something a person wants to read or engage with because it has a part of you in it.

And finally, talk about what you do in simple terms – connect and teach others. Write about your work and why you do it.

That’s why I’m quite keen on watching how the search engine Clew works out. It’s a place where you can find real people writing rather than the auto-generated spam that the big technology providers are leaning into developing.

I’m hoping that there is still a place for a human approach to service.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.20pm

Sheffield, U.K.

One of my great regrets, and I don’t have many, is that I spent too long putting people’s status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone’s name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff. – Bill Nighy

I have had Will Storr’s “The science of storytelling” lying around for a long time.

Yesterday I finally blitzed through it.

Stories, it turns out, are fundamental to human nature. They’re wired into our biology. Language evolved, some think, so that we could tell stories.

But what is the power of story?

Stories are the basis of tribal propaganda. We can bring together and hold the minds of a group with a story that makes them heroes and the others the enemy. Stories are how leaders get and hold power.

Stories can make people do bad things. More violence has been done by people who believed that they were following an ideal way of being than has been done for greed and ambition, or pure sadism.

Why am I telling you this?

Because if you have the power of storytelling you must use it carefully. You can do great harm.

But you can also do good.

But first, let’s talk about how it can make you money.

Imagine you have a product and you have a prospect in front of you.

What do you have to get across – what’s the one message they need to get – so that you make the sale?

Have a think – it’s not obvious.

Is it that it solves a pain that they have? Perhaps.

Is it that they’ll make money? Meh.

We are social beings and what’s the one thing we crave?

Status.

We crave status. We want to have it now. We want to have more of it. And we’re miserable when we see people who have more of it than us.

Well, maybe you don’t. But it’s safe to assume that your prospect does. A little bit at least.

So what you have to do is get across how you will help them gain status.

If you’re a consultant, how will your approach help them look good in front of their boss, or get more power and responsibility/

And it’s not hard to remember that adverts for luxury watches and cars are all about status.

Or, closer to where the naked lust for status is more visible, just see how children fight over a desirable Pokemon card.

Use your storytelling skills to show your prospect how you will raise their status and you will become rich.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain. – Epictetus

This is the final post in my book reading project on John Seddon’s book “Freedom from Command and Control”.

All the posts are listed here.

Seddon’s ideas are different from the ones you will find in the mainstream – and so it’s tempting to assume they’re not relevant.

After all, if something works then everyone will be doing it. Right?

Wrong.

Here’s a puzzle that my brother-in-law asked me. An elephant can pass through the eye of a needle. But its tail does not. Why is that?

If you want to improve your business you have to think differently.

This is the difference between a command-and-control approach and one based on thinking in systems.

Instead of separating measures and work you should integrate the two.

This means that accountants sitting far away from where the work is done crunching numbers and creating reports don’t add value.

Walking the floor and looking at what’s going on does.

Splitting your team into divisional silos and functions that don’t talk to each other creates conflict and pushes up costs.

Creating flow, with a clean output from one area being the input to the next reduces costs.

Instead of thinking that the only people with brains are the top leadership get all of your team to bring their brains to work. Reward them for doing so.

Finally, you don’t get better by codifying method – by creating forms or lecturing about processes.

You get better by doing the work, thinking about methodology, trying things out and learning. Writing things down helps – but it needs to done by those who do the doing rather than imposed by someone who wants a tick mark from an auditor.

When you create a business that does this you have happy customers and happy employees and you have something that creates social value.

This is not the kind of thing we’re taught to look for.

And that’s because it’s simple. It doesn’t require new systems, big technology, AI or anything else.

It’s just about people working well together.

So it doesn’t have a big marketing budget. Just like weight loss drugs are sold to you instead of beans and rice. They’ll both help you lose weight and reduce your risk from chronic diseases, but one costs a grand and a half a month for the rest of your life and the other is pennies a day.

Which one do you think people will market to you?

This is something to think about.

If it’s being sold to you, it’s probably bad for you.

Did you work out what the elephant story was trying to teach you?

It’s really hard to get an elephant through the eye of a needle. The elephant is big, the needle is small. It’s a big task – like changing your entire way of thinking to see what works and what doesn’t.

Some people succeed, they fit their elephants through the needle and figure out what change is needed – what they have to do.

And now that they’ve worked it out you’d think that everyone would follow?

It’s been shown to be possible – surely the elephant’s tail will pass through quickly. All these other people will take the opportunity and go after these better ideas and methods.

But they don’t. Sometimes they go backwards and reimplement command and control in an organisation that has managed to get rid of it.

Despite all the advances in technology the best way to build a business is with people who like doing what they do with customers who appreciate their work.

Focus on building a business that does that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 8.48pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people. – Tom Peters

Here are three things to remember:

1. Marketing is the art of creating a conversation.
2. Sales is the art of creating a customer.
3. Business is the art of creating value.

I’m at the section of John Seddon’s book ‘Freedom from command and control’ where he talks about customers.

Seddon is not a fan of customer relationship management (CRM) systems – after all, he asks, which one of your customers really wants to be “managed”?

Not one, is the answer. No one wants you to track and collect data and treat them like an object, one to be described and cataloged and retrieved and polished and put away.

The problem is that the only messages you get is that the way to do anything is with software.

That’s a message sent to you by people that make tools – so you should really be wary.

The reality is that your customers are people and if you want to create value for them you need to understand what they need and give it to them.

It’s that simple.

But not easy.

I have, I think it’s fair to say, created systems that have enabled the delivery of billions of pounds worth of transactions.

What kind of complicated system was this, you might ask?

It was a spreadsheet.

Not because I couldn’t build a complicated tool – I can and did – but a complicated tool did not help when the key thing was delivering what “work” was from the point of view of the customer.

Complexity does not create trust, if anything it first makes people wary and then if there is anything at all wrong in what you’re showing, it burns it off entirely.

Trust emerges when a customer believes that you understand their situation and know what they need.

It starts with listening.

Now, the fancy term for this, is qualitative research.

You’re going to listen to your customer, ask questions, take notes, look around their operations, read about them – and gather qualitative data – going beyond the numbers to build a rich appreciation of their situation.

This is not the kind of thing anyone types into a CRM, into a little box that’s meant for a summary of a discussion.

It’s a conversation that’s had between someone who needs work doing and someone who knows how the work is done.

Anybody else in the middle of that conversation, anything else in the middle of that conversation, is in the way.

And boy do people like getting in the way.

As organizations grow, all kinds of people get in between customers and the individuals that do value work – the work that the customer needs doing.

These people slow things down, try to manage from a distance, standardize things that should be left to the discretion of workers and generally complicate the heck out the simple task of working on what needs to be done and creating value.

It’s one of the hazards of growth.

Most companies struggle, not because of the competition, but because they just stop innovating, stop moving forward – they are stopped by the inertia that builds as they get bigger.

But there’s always a way out of the mess – a very simple way to cut through the tangled mess of an organizational wilderness.

Contact your customer or prospect. Get them on a video call. Talk to them. Listen.

And you will learn all you need to learn to build your business.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 8.58pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. – Lao Tzu

What do you think of when you’re asked to imagine a leader?

The chances are that it’s some sort of caricature of what leadership really is like.

There are some leaders who truly believe that mission and vision statements work, that putting a wishful idea on paper somehow makes it come true.

That’s not the case. A bad business will stay bad no matter how many vision statements you write.

A bad business can also survive for a surprisingly long time.

An evolutionary model probably makes more sense. There’s an ecosystem of businesses and some are new, some are old, some are good, some are bad, and some are alive and some die.

It’s a neverending game.

Leader number one, then, is the one on a pedestal, the one that point to where we need to go and takes everyone with them.

I suspect such leaders are discovered if they succeeded. How many great leaders can you name that lost?

Napoleon comes to mind. Is Custer one?

The second kind of leader turns things around – they call themselves servants of their people.

Their job is to support and push their team forward.

I’m a little sceptical about that one as well, especially if they claim to be servants while earning 3,000 times as much as their employees.

The model that I think is relevant for this day and age is a leader who is a colleague.

Probably one that has more experience than you or has taken the risky step to start the business – that’s why they’re in charge.

But they’re there because they know what they’re doing.

And if you’re the person in charge it’s never been easier to work alongside your team members, regardless of where they are in the world.

You can go and see the work being done simply by joining a call and sharing screens.

That kind of leader understands what’s happening at the point where customers interact with the business and tries to shorten the time between first contact and the receipt of money for a completed service.

They do that by understanding the business as a system and working to improve it.

Simple really.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.33pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Success is really about expertise. – Steve Young

I’m on the sixth post going through John Seddon’s “Freedom from command and control”. You can find all the posts here.

Seddon has a basic model in his book for any service that has a structure where the customer has something that’s broken and needs it fixing – he calls this a break-fix archetype.

Something has gone wrong so you get a call.

That’s a form of customer demand.

The first assumption is that this is a bad thing. You should prevent customers from getting to you at all costs – you need a dial control system – press 1 to hold forever – and so on.

Or you need to build a call centre to handle all these calls.

Or, these days, use a chatbot. Or an AI answering service. There’s one being promoted now that has a human type voice and can answer millions of calls.

But before you do anything at all you really need to understand why people are calling in the first place.

If things are going well there should be no reason to call at all, should there?

The call is actually a signal – a sign that something is going wrong and needs fixing.

The first thing you should do is start listening to calls and answering them. Try and understand the problem.

And here’s the second mistake people make.

They assume that their most experienced people are too valuable to spend time talking to customers so they get low-paid temps or administrative staff to do that instead.

But these individuals lack the experience needed to really understand and diagnose what’s going on.

So they might spend more time on a call and get things wrong and create more problems than if one of your experts had a five minute chat and worked out what to do.

The second correct step is to get someone who knows what they’re doing to have a chat with the person that has a problem.

Which will then lead naturally to the next step which is to figure out what needs to be done and respond to the customer, ideally resolving the problem.

This is really hard to do – managers have to find something to do with their time so they end up measuring things and trying to find incentives – rather than just paying people and letting them get on with their work.

If you’re just starting a service business this is something worth thinking about – because it’s going to be difficult.

Don’t try and measure and incentivize people in a bid to motivate them.

Let them be motivated by being able to do a good job and make things better for customers.

Pay them a salary, rather than bonuses or commissions or some other fancy stuff.

If you need someone on your team it should be on a salary.

And their job should be to talk to customers and deliver what they need.

As a manager, your job is to help them do that – getting them resources and getting roadblocks out of the way.

Why do this?

Because no one grow a business by focusing on costs.

Focus on delivering value – and doing that will drive out costs.

That’s the way to succeed.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 8.55pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming

Some people think management is about people and motivation and all around happiness.

It’s not.

People are important, of course. But the system they’re in matters more.

If you’re lucky enough to be born somewhere stable and prosperous then your life chances and outcomes are going to be different from someone with similar personal characteristics but living in a war-torn or unsettled situation.

We can’t blame people, especially if what they’re doing has a success rate equivalent to doing a coin flip.

Let me give you an example.

There are people in the world who trade for a living – they manage financial positions and buy and sell commodities and stocks and all sorts of things.

And they imagine that they’ll make lots of money if they’re smart at what they do – if they buy at the right time and if they sell at the right time.

But simple maths will show you that they’re probably going to lose money.

Let’s say you’re a trader and your job is to buy and sell a commodity, say copper.

Let’s say you call the bottom of the market right most of the time – you’re on the money around 70% of the time.

And let’s also say you call the top of the market right 70% of the time.

So, you buy when it’s cheap 70% of the time and you sell when the market is high 70% of the time – you’re going to make money, right?

Except, you’re doing two things, buying and selling. When you combine the probabilities (0.7 x 0.7) you have less than a 50% chance of making a profit.

You might as well give the money away.

The people that make the money are the ones that do one thing well. Like buying a good stock and holding onto it forever.

Or these days, just buying the whole market and getting on with the rest of your day.

Now, if your business is not a trading one but more of a service business, what should you focus on?

We are, if you remember, carrying on with a series of posts examining John Seddon’s book ‘Freedom from command and control’.

The thing you’ve got to work on is the system – not the people, not targets, not incentives, not motivation – but the system.

Whatever results you’re getting right now from your business are the results that your business system is perfectly designed to produce.

If you want things to change you have to work on the system.

So how do you go about doing that?

Well, if you’re an engineer the approach is pretty clear.

Engineers have to work with things that have to work. If you build a circuit and it doesn’t work then there’s something wrong with the system and you have to dig in and figure out what’s wrong.

You don’t just start pulling wires out – you first need a model to work with, some kind of circuit diagram of your system.

And that diagram can help you figure out where a problem might be – if the smell of a burning capacitor doesn’t alert you – and what you need to replace to fix it.

A business is like that, except the smell of burning might be a customer complaint or stressed staff.

Something is causing a problem in the system.

You need to learn how to talk to people and map out what’s happening and diagnose possible problems.

It takes time and effort and a willingness to spend the time and effort working with your team to figure out what’s not working and try something different.

And that’s all you can do – there is no perfect model – you just need to look at what’s going on, come up with some ideas, do some research, try changing something, see what happens, learn from that and go around the loop again.

We sometimes make things too complicated.

Give your team the freedom to get things done for clients.

Monitor the activity, the voice of the process, and get out of the way if everything is working.

When it’s not, ring the big red bell, stop everything and get involved, work together, and figure out what you can do to fix the problem.

As a manager, you are the only person with the power to change the system.

Therefore, that is the thing that you should focus on the most.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.23pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack. – Winston Churchill

The most important people in your organization are the ones that directly serve customers.

And that’s that.

Okay, let’s spend a little more time on this as I continue working through John Seddon’s “Freedom from command and control”.

Imagine an organization chart – one from any business.

At the top is the top management, the CEO, the CFO.

On one branch sit the support services, Finance, HR, IT. They’re supposed to enable business. Sometimes they prevent it.

On the other branch sit managers, from big managers to little managers.

At the bottom are the people that do the work.

And that’s how they are seen, as the lowest on the ladder, the bottom of the food chain.

Now, this may not be reality, things have changed on the ground.

But the pictures in our heads are from a hundred years ago so if you set out now to build your own business it’s possible that your mental models need updating.

When you first start out you serve customers yourself – and as the most experienced person on the staff and the one that cares the most about your customers – they get a brilliant service from you.

But how do you step back and bring in a team that still keeps customers happy – what’s going to stop the lazy buggers from doing as little as possible?

Well, you have to stop thinking of them in that way, to start with.

Your job is to get better at hiring. Finding the people that are going to be part of your team.

That’s not easy. It requires overcoming biases and taking considered decisions.

Hire slowly. Build great training systems. Support your team.

There will be problematic hires. Things won’t always work out. Make tough decisions quickly. It’s better for everyone that way.

Above all, don’t try and manage by targets and timesheets.

It’s going to be tempting, but you will create more problems.

Instead, do exactly what clients need. No less. And no more.

You will find that your operations run more smoothly, your team is happier, and your customers satisfied.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.40pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them. – Dalai Lama

This is the third post in a series looking at key ideas in John Seddon’s ‘Freedom from command and control”.

The ideas in this post are possibly the most important ones to learn if you want to dramatically improve how your business operates and how happy your team are.

Let’s start with a question that comes up all the time.

How many new people do we need?

You’ve got a problem. Things aren’t working very well. Or you see an opportunity. There’s a market you can get into. What’s stopping you?

Your answer, quite possibly, is that we’re too busy already – we need more people.

Everyone is maxed out working on stuff and there is no time left to deal with these issues or go after opportunities.

But hold on, what are your team actually doing now?

Some managers have no idea what the actual work is that their team does.

And that’s a problem, because you need to know – you need to sit with them and learn about what they’re working on.

This is the demand being placed on them.

But what we don’t realise is that there are two kinds of demand: value demand and failure demand.

Value demand is work that clients actually need – this is the outcome that makes them happy, such as the successful payout from their insurance claim, the signing of an important contract, the cash back from an error that you helped to argue.

Failure demand is the work resulting from a mistake – that error that requires rebilling the entire year, the handoff to someone that drops the ball and requires redoing all the interviews, the person who sits on a problem until it is too late and creates a massive PR issue.

Both types of demand look like work but they’re not.

What you’ve got to do is drive out failure demand and increase the time you spend on value demand.

Some people think sales is all about demand – you need a salesperson to get the client to agree to things, right?

Wrong. In most cases a salesperson, Seddon argues, is like one of those players at a fair picking ducks out of a pond.

It’s not their special ability that makes the sale but the fact that the duck is within reach.

It’s the demand that happens to meet you at the right time.

So, to sell more, you need to be awake to value demand and all of your team need to know what that looks like so you can sell more and build your business.

But how do you get that keen eyed, motivated, enthusiastic team?

You do it by getting them focused on the customer and doing good work.

You don’t break them into silos and divisions and have work going from one place to the other.

Instead, you try and get one person to manage the end to end process for a customer, from getting started, to delivering the result.

If that person doesn’t know enough, you don’t hand off the work to someone else.

Instead, you pull expert support and work with the person to get the job done, which means that they will see how to do it and get trained along the way.

Eventually, they’ll do more and more and you’ll have a team of experts all delighting customers with their capabilities.

And, by the way, your team will be happy at work which means they’re less likely to leave.

And that virtuous combination, happy customers, happy team will lead to profits and growth.

Good operations create good businesses that grow.

It seems very simple doesn’t it.

But it’s not easy. You have to unlearn assumptions you’ve had for a while and learn new approaches that are based on tricky things like trust and patience and the ability to deal with uncertainty and complexity.

We’ll talk about some of that later.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. – Lao Tzu

This is the second post in my study of John Seddon’s ‘Freedom from command and control’.

Before I go through some of the key ideas that will help you create better service businesses, I need to jot down a few notes about representing knowledge.

As you might have noticed I use drawing as a way to structure my thinking, which then helps me to write a post.

My approach is inspired by several approaches to drawing as a way of thinking, including mind mapping, concept mapping, sketchnoting and thinking maps.

A good introduction to diagramming techniques used in systems thinking can be found here.

I recently came across Paul Fernhout’s website from a talk he gave at Libreplanet 2021 and discovered itIBIS – indented text Issue Based Information Systems – based on the work of Werner Kunz and Horst Rittel in the 1960s.

Essentially, this is a way of visualizing complex information using textual or graphical tools.

It’s similar to what I do with notes, and there are overlapping issues of theoretical interest, that I should probably pull out as I carry on with my PhD.

But the point I want to make is that it’s given me some thoughts about how to think my way into a piece of useful writing.

A document that I go back to a few times is Get Writing by M. Batchelor.

One of the suggestions she makes is to work out your outline in a talk.

An outline, as you know, is a structure of what you’re trying to communicate. And it’s a technique I’ve always hated.

I prefer to work out what I want to say by writing it down and seeing what happens.

But that ends up in rambling works like this post, which your well behaved AI tool will never write.

And that’s ok, because what I’m interested in is getting thoughts into your head, not just heaping up content.

So… one way of writing an outline is to use this idea of indented text as a way to examine what you’re reading and thinking about.

The IBIS technique has three key components – questions, comments and pros/cons.

But we’re not limited to just that – for example in the image above I’m using Colin Eden’s bipolar structure of “rather than”, represented by three dots like this “…”.

So the first line should be read as “learn and improve rather than command and control”.

Okay, one last thing.

We tend to think that we use reasoning to think objectively about our options and make balanced decisions.

It turns out that might not be right.

Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that we use reason to win arguments and that might be a better explanation of what happens in real life.

So, the reason you’re seeing the image above as a mix of text and diagrams is because I’m thinking of experimenting with that as an aid to arguing the points I’m learning about. You can see the points. Maybe the pictures will help. Let’s see, shall we.

The ideas that you need to know to help you create better services come from ideas that were worked out in manufacturing, in particular Toyota.

They figured out that learning about a system and trying to improve it led to better outcomes than trying to boss people around and control them with numbers in spreadsheets.

It was more efficient to only do something when a customer needed you to do it – you started making a car when a customer asked for it, rather than building lots of cars just in case.

We’ve just rewatched the new Karate Kid, so the picture is of the teacher and student connected with bamboo poles. One moves only when the other does. That’s connection.

So how do you build a connection?

Well, by working on the relationship, of course.

You don’t just get there by relying on marketing.

If you spend your time connecting to customer needs then you won’t need as many people pushing paper creating budgets and forecasts and hopes and dreams – you won’t need a management factory.

And if you know what customers need you can create it for them, even if it’s different each time – even if it has variety.

That’s going to shock some people who will argue that only rigid standardization can work.

Ignore them.

The way to create what customers need is to have your team bring their brains to work rather than mindlessly obey your orders.

If your team is engaged, cares about clients and wants to do a good job they will build what is needed.

And your total costs will fall, when viewed from an end to end perspective. It might look like you’re spending too much time with one customer, but what you learn will drive down total costs.

Focusing on customer needs and doing only what needs to be done as effectively as possible means work flows unimpeded through your organisation.

That leads to economies of flow rather than economies of scale.

And these ideas are going to be fundamental as you take the next steps in your business.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh