Category: Strategy

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How To Structure A Presentation For Busy People

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Tuesday, 9.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson. – John Henrik Clarke

People in general, and busy people in particular, are only interested in one thing – what does this mean for me?

When you structure a presentation for such folk you need to focus on what they want and need to know – and expand from there.

This is quite different from the way most people plan their presentations.

We’re taught to think through stuff sequentially – first we did this and then we tried that and this is the result.

That’s ok if you’re explaining your reasoning to someone who is trying to see if you’re doing things right – but that’s not usually the kind of person in your audience.

This other, busy person wants to know what the result is that you reached in the end – not the details of the wrong turns you took on the way.

There are a few ways to construct a story that works – and one of them is shown in the picture above.

The What? So What? Now What? model is a useful way to think through your message.

For example, let’s say you’re looking at a client’s portfolio and have found a number of ways in which you can help them.

Are you going to start by talking about all the work you’ve done or by showing them the size of the opportunity you’ve uncovered?

The second point will get you more attention.

“I can save you a hundred thousand pounds” will get you more time than “we started by asking for all your paperwork”.

The first gets attention – the other causes people to start fiddling with their phones.

In examples like these the first two points almost run into each other.

We analysed your portfolio (what?) and found a big bunch of opportunities (so what?).

The third follows closely behind.

Now we’d like to implement them for you (now what?)

In other situations the three points stand out more distinctly.

  • The economy is slowing down (what?)
  • As a freight provider, you’re going to lose money (so what?)
  • We can help you cut costs and reduce the impact (now what?)

The smallest presentation you can have to communicate a complex message is probably four slides.

In the first one you tell them what matters to them – what result you’re going to provide.

We’ve found a way to save you a hundred thousand pounds.

That gets their attention.

And then you explain what’s going on, what it means for them and what happens next using the what, so what and now what model.

The point is that people are really not interested in all the background work you did.

They want to know what it means for them.

So, just tell them that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Respond When Something Goes Wrong?

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Monday, 8.08pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. – General Colin Powell

I think when a lot of us say we want more responsibility when what we really mean is we want to be paid more for doing the same job – or better still, less of it.

Okay, that’s a little cynical perhaps.

Or is it?

The one thing every one of us have experienced is something going wrong – and how we react in such situations is something I started thinking about recently.

Our approach starts right from childhood.

We don’t want to do the wrong thing, to get in trouble but it must often seem to children that they can barely move through the day without doing one wrong thing after another.

Running, jumping, screaming, throwing, shouting, wrestling – everything remotely fun seems to make a grown-up appear and tell you off.

We must grow up with a healthy sense of not wanting to be in trouble.

Unless, of course, we give up trying and just accept that’s what’s going to happen – or we think through the worst case and decide we can live with that.

If you stop for a minute and think you’ll see that there are lots of directions you could go in when something goes wrong.

As the picture shows, it ranges from putting the blame on someone else to running away.

But there are a few times when we should stop and think before we act.

Specifically, in a work related situation what should you do when something goes wrong?

The way that probably will not work is the one where you try and shift responsibility onto someone else.

We all see these programmes where someone gets fired because they do something wrong.

For a start, the person firing you is probably doing you a favour by releasing you from a toxic environment.

That’s because the only people who manage to remain are the ones that hide what’s going wrong – and that doesn’t usually end well.

The other thing that you should be careful of is taking all the blame yourself.

In most situations you know a lot about what is going on and so, when something goes wrong, it seems like everything is out in the open and you’ll be seen as a failure.

In reality, very few people care about how things are going as long as they’re getting done sort of on time and on schedule.

There are two more approaches that don’t really help.

The first is trying to avoid doing anything that could be seen as wrong in the first place – hiding behind legal clauses for example, or just not getting into the situation in the first place.

That’s because if you do something wrong the legal defence won’t help your reputation, and if you don’t take a risk every once in a while life gets a loss less interesting.

The second is getting too analytical over the whole thing and working through complex chains of cause and effect.

You see this happen all the time on the news as journalists try and trip up politicians by asking them hypothetical questions – what would you do if this happened and that came to pass, for example.

The politicians, sensibly, refuse to speculate unless they want to and make up a possible future that they would like to happen.

There are two questions that you should ask and that can help.

The first is “what does this mean from the customer’s point of view.”

The fact is that the problem will affect someone – and what matters is just how much that is.

Does this mean a day’s delay, a week, a month, a year?

Have you missed your chance altogether or can you rearrange?

Are they facing a yawning chasm or is it a slightly bigger step than they were expecting?

The second question is “what’s the next action.”

The thing we have to really really get is that we can’t change the past or influence the future.

We can only act in the now – and that means thinking of the next thing that needs to be done to make the situation better.

Finally, there are two things to keep in mind that may help.

The first is to always think of the worst case situation – what is really going to happen if things go wrong?

In the world of work this is usually something you can live with and come back from.

The other thing is to expect that people won’t deliver – so set your expectations accordingly and have a backup plan.

That way when they do deliver everything they promised you can be happy to be proved wrong.

And if they don’t, you can deliver what you need to do anyway.

Because what really matters when you’re responsible is that you deliver.

Eventually.

Cheers.

Karthik Suresh

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How Are We Going To Deal With Waste Around The World?

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Saturday, 9.12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall

I am not a big fan of waste.

No one is, I’m sure, but there is a difference between wanting things to be clean and tidy and not wanting to create waste in the first place.

The reason why this concerns me is that I, like many others, have family living in places where the waste management systems are failing to deal with what’s generated.

This leads to a worse quality of life – and to disease.

If you live in the West then it is hard to remember to wake up every day and be grateful for having clean air, clean water and clean streets.

In many of the pictures I draw as I think through concepts the landscapes are clean, fresh – showing the countryside and nature as it should be.

We perhaps don’t think too often of what the opposite might be – and how impotent you might feel as an individual, however motivated, to deal with the mess in front of you.

So, what do people do and is there some hope?

Well, it turns out that there is.

First of all, as the old Yorkshire saying goes, “where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

There’s money in waste, especially as you transition from dumping the stuff in big holes in the ground to processing and treating it instead.

You need certain things, including infrastructure, trained people and a growth in awareness.

I think that’s happening. The last time I visited Mumbai, for example, there was a marked improvement in the streets due to the policies of the government.

But really, it’s about individuals as well.

For example, I came across Almitra Patel while doing research for this post.

She was the first Indian woman engineer to graduate from MIT in 1959.

She spent thirty years working in industry.

And then, in the nineties, she led citizen-based activism programmes to compel municipalities to separate waste at the home before collection.

The thing you have to recognise about change is that it takes time.

It takes decades to build up the expertise and capability to deal with large, systemic problems.

And somebody has to be willing to invest and fund such efforts – it comes from governments and charities – but it has to come from somewhere.

For people like me who have moved between cultures, we feel a responsibility to give back as well – and examples like Almitra are ones that we can use to understand how that might be possible.

But, it’s also important to remember that we don’t just have to build systems to manage waste – we can avoid creating it in the first place.

India, if the figures are to be believed, generates 135,000 tons a day of solid waste.

That’s around 50 million tons a year.

Total waste in the UK is over 200 million tons a year.

I’m not sure if this is a like for like figure but the UK deposits 52.3 million tons of waste in landfill – which probably counts as solid waste.

In other words, the UK with 60 million people creates more waste than India, with over a billion.

That should make some people pause and think.

I think when you first look at a problem like how to deal with waste the immensity of the challenge can overwhelm you.

But, as you look into it deeper the problems do seem solvable – perhaps even profitable.

After all, how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What’s The Alternative To Planning Every Step?

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Saturday, 8.49pm

Sheffield, U.K.

To catch the ball, face up, look at all of my options and then pass. I was playing hot potato. I didn’t want to be the guy to stall the triangle. – Karl Malone

You probably have a preferred way of working – perhaps you carefully plan exactly what you’re going to do before starting work; Maybe you just get stuck in and see what happens.

Planning has never really worked for me.

It seems a good idea, in principle, but in practice it never quite delivers.

And I’m reminded of this approach because of a few projects that are on the go right now.

For example, I was wondering what it might take to start a podcast.

What kind of kit do you need? Should you script it all out or just go with basic points. What would you talk about?

Now, if you want answers to these questions all you have to do is head over to YouTube and you get a range of views and advice, all very helpful and interesting.

What would you do next?

For a start, one video explained that you should be aware that most podcasts don’t go past seven episodes.

The answer, they explained, was to make sure you really know what you’re going to talk about, who your audience is and have a plan for the structure of your episodes.

They started losing me around that point.

And I think part of the reason is that everyone defaults to a particular mode of thinking that they believe is the right one to have at this point.

Take starting a business, for example.

Everyone wants you to have a business plan – something in writing that sets out what you’re going to do, the size of the market growth projections, how you’re going to raise finance – and a whole bunch of other things to show that you’ve thought through what needs to happen.

Plans might be useless, as Eisenhower said, but planning is essential.

I wonder though if this way of thinking misses the point, perhaps two points.

The first is that at the start of a project you probably don’t know where you want to end up.

Maybe you have a vague idea or a very clear conviction – but things change.

And they usually change when you’re confronted by reality.

Reality that can come from inside or outside you.

The type that comes from inside is when you start a business or podcast or project and realise as you get going that it’s not really something that you’re passionate about and driven by.

Maybe you thought that it was something worth doing – perhaps you thought there was a market that hadn’t been exploited and you were the one that could do it.

In other words, you chased after an opportunity.

The type that comes from outside is when you don’t get the confirmation you expected from those around you or people in general.

This is when you don’t get enough followers, enough customers or enough recognition.

At this point, the lack of apparent traction puts you off – maybe to the point where you abandon the project altogether.

The underlying issue in these situations is that you are chasing something.

The way I look at this, borrowing a metaphor from value investing, is like a surfer.

I’ve never surfed but I’m reliably informed that surfers don’t paddle out into the sea, look for a big wave and head towards it, hoping to catch it.

Instead, they get in position and wait for a wave to come along and lift them up.

In other words, they don’t catch a wave; the wave catches them.

So, this is important for the internal challenge you face – if you’re doing something because you like doing it then you’ll probably keep doing it.

If you don’t then other things will seem more interesting soon and you won’t.

And, when you like what you’re doing you won’t mind waiting until the wave comes along.

I assume surfers sitting out there on their boards chatting to each other are having a good time.

I’d be thinking of sharks…

And they’re happy to wait till the opportunity comes along because they like being out there.

So the key thing is being ready to wait it out.

And you can’t plan for this because you don’t know anything about the future – you can’t predict when the opportunity will arise.

So that means you need to have the ability to keep going until it materialises – and that means thinking not about the long-term plan but about the next step and the immediate options you have.

The key is to preserve optionality – your ability to make the most of what comes along.

That means what you need to think about is not what the grand theme of your project might be but about what the next action is.

With enough action the grand theme will emerge.

I find, anyway.

Your mileage may vary.

The key, I have found over years of professional decision making, is often to leave the decision until the last minute.

When you’re not sure how things are going to go then keep options open.

Don’t quit your job, for example, until your side hustle is paying you more than you’re making now, or you have a contract offer for a new one.

Don’t make decisions about themes and equipment and things that will cost you time and money until you absolutely have to – because you may need to change your mind.

Start by taking action – and keep your options open.

People often achieve more by setting off than they do sitting down and making plans.

The counter to this is when you know the right thing to do.

In value investing that’s when you know something is under priced – and that’s when you commit – go hard on the dollar, as they say.

So, in a nutshell, the alternative to planning is to keep your options open most of the time and be ready to act.

Because on those rare occasions, the times when the wave comes along and lifts you up, you want to be ready to surf.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Role Do You Play In Your Organisation?

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In the military, as in any organization, giving the order might be the easiest part. Execution is the real game. – Russel Honore

Every once in a while you look around and wonder what people do at work.

One answer is found in Robert X. Cringley’s 1993 book Accidental empires.

In his book he talks about the way companies grow – and likens what happens to a military operation.

As an army brat I grew up conscious of uniforms and rank; packing light and always being ready; and learning that I didn’t like being told what to do by anyone else.

There’s a place in an organisation, however, for almost any kind of individual – whether you fit in or not depends on what stage of growth the company is in.

In a startup, for example, you’re low on resources.

You don’t walk into a startup and get an induction and a tour and a few days briefing.

When you’re employee number one or number two into a startup you probably spend the first day building your computer.

I did anyway – I think I worked off my own machine for a while, actually.

The point is that the people you want on your team in the early days are the ones that think and act like commandos.

If you want to invade a country you don’t stroll up with your army.

You send in commandos first – so they can blow up roads and supply lines and generally soften the target before you commit your main forces.

The job of a startup is to take the beach – establish a presence in a market.

That means nothing matters except customers and product.

All the rest of the stuff can wait – policies, HR, timesheets, legals. None of those matter until you have a product or service and customers ready to try you out.

When you’ve established your presence, that’s when you send in the infantry.

These folk get into their trucks and tanks and roll up.

Yes, they’ve got to do some work. They’re the main force and they take over the job of securing and expanding your presence, fighting their way through the rest of the country.

That’s the scale up stage of your startup – when you go part the three or four people who were there from the start and bring in people to do jobs – jobs that didn’t exist till you created them.

Now, once you’ve taken control of your territory you need to get settled for the long haul.

This is when you need the administrators and the police – the rules and regulations that make for a society.

That’s the point in the life of the company where you bring in people who write policies and administer them. The ones who make rules and make sure you all follow.

This is when it becomes important to monitor and measure and watch over what your people are doing.

Customers are a lot less important now – what’s important is control and process and standards.

The first stage is exciting and you get a chance to be creative – but there’s also a very real chance you’ll fail – but also a chance you’ll do very well.

The last stage is safe and you’ll have a good career – perhaps end up being a well-regarded professional.

The middle is a solid place to be – good experience that you can take to any other company looking to scale up and build its business.

The important thing really is figuring out which one of these three types of workers you are – and then checking if you’re in the right kind of company.

If you’re a commando, you won’t last long in a third-wave company – they just wont know what to do with you and your habit of not following the rules.

And, a police officer in a first wave company will have nothing to do – everything will need policing because it’s all being done too fast and doesn’t follow the rules – but no one will stop long enough to listen.

But what’s important is knowing what’s right for you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why You Need To Know The Stages Of Motivational Readiness For Change

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The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. – Albert Einstein

The writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss came up with a soundbite that he found resonated again and again with audiences.

“The major fears of modern man”, he said, “could be boiled down to two things: too much email and getting fat.”

I don’t know about you, but I have any number of excuses for why I can’t exercise right now or tomorrow or every day.

And many of us have experienced the oscillations of diets and impulse eating and in general just how hard it is to get and stay healthy.

But this challenge is the same in many other fields as well.

It’s hard to create and sustain a healthy sales process, an operations process or a commitment to creating research output or content.

Now, when we look at problems we often come at them in one of two ways.

We think of solutions – ways to solve problems.

Or we think of them as investigations – looking to understand and explain what is happening and, in doing so, improving the situation.

But, even if you know using these processes or others what needs to be done – what stops us or our clients from implementing them?

For example, if you know and your clients know that they should have a social media marketing strategy – then why don’t they just go ahead and do it?

Are they lazy? Uninformed? Lacking in vision? Unable to grasp the nettle? Reach for the stars?

Cliches leap to mind when we think of others and how they fail to do the bleeding obvious.

The situation is more nuanced when it comes to ourselves, of course.

So, in such situations the stages of motivational readiness for change model by Prochaska and DiClemente (1983) might be a useful one.

The model, as shown in the picture above adapted to the problem of physical activity has five stages.

In the first stage you’re just not thinking about being active – it’s home from work and feet up in front of the telly.

In the second stage you’re aware of your expanding belly and wondering what you might do about it.

In the next stage you take some tentative steps – walking more, perhaps. Going for a run.

In the fourth stage you’re doing enough activity and you have been doing it for some time – perhaps exercising three times a week for the last six months.

In the last stage you’ve made it a habit – you exercise regularly and have arranged your life so that it’s something you do as part of your daily routine.

There are a few things worth noting about this model.

The first is that if you skip stages you are more likely to fail.

For example, if you are in stage 2, thinking about change and jump straight to going to the gym three times a week, the effort required and the increased chances of injury are quite likely to stop you when something goes wrong.

And when that happens you don’t go back a stage, but perhaps all the way back to the very beginning – when you stop thinking about change at all.

The second is that wherever you are in this model, you could always slide back – it’s sometimes seen as a cyclical model for that reason, as you fall back a stage and then clamber forwards again.

If you do social media marketing the similarity with a client’s journey is probably obvious.

A tool making company’s crusty old founder thinks that this whole social media thing is complete nonsense.

The next generation are more digitally savvy and trying to see what they can do.

If they move too quickly the founder will rein things in – so that have to start with a little activity.

Then, as comfort with the process grows they ramp up until they’re doing enough to keep up with the competition.

And finally, they reach digital maturity – become digitally native and thrive.

Or slide back and go out of business.

Each one’s mileage varies.

So, if you recognise that you’re in one of these stages what can you do to move forward?

Here are a few suggestions.

First, start with small changes and work up to bigger ones. Try and do things that result in success – remember that nothing succeeds like success and that works for this too.

Second, make choices that work for you and not because you think they are the right ones to do.

Don’t go running because your friends do – when you would rather lift weights or jump rope.

Pick things that work for your body and environment.

Third, assume you will fail and work out what you will do when that happens.

If you planned to go for a walk, for example, and the heavens open – what are you going to do?

Watch telly or do some yoga?

It’s important to decide ahead of time what you’ll do when things don’t work out because you’ll probably do the easiest, most pleasurable thing – like flopping on the sofa and watching telly.

The main point of this model is that even if you know what you should do – it’s really hard to get yourself motivated to do it.

The key is making it easier for you to create, grow and sustain a habit – whether it’s do with exercise or the way you run your business.

And it all starts with being more aware of which stage you’re in right now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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The Difference Between Hard And Soft Systems Thinking

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Wednesday, 9.02pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. – Donella H. Meadows

It is worth asking, every once in a while, where the ideas and opinions we have come from.

Take the word system, for example.

It’s a word that is used all the time in all kinds of situations.

We think of collections of things as systems – like computer systems and gaming systems.

We think of big, complex things as systems such as the justice system, the economic system or the financial system.

And thinking of things in this way causes us to come to a very simple, and very wrong conclusion.

We think of systems as being “real” – as existing for real in the outside world.

As real as flowers and ponies and tigers.

But, the thing is that the “system” only exists in your mind and in the minds of the people that you’ve shared your idea of the system with – or vice versa.

So, why is this important?

Many approaches over the last century have focused on our ability to create things that we call systems – and human beings have been very successful at making lots of cool things as a result.

People have made railways and rockets and medicine that actually works.

Now, having used such a way of thinking very successfully in certain situations – we often make the assumption that it will work equally well in any situation.

Which is why you get technical people who believe that they can build a solution to any problem because they have built a solution to a particular problem.

It’s an engineering mindset – and one that sits behind a number of approaches to problem solving – including AI and machine learning.

But history is also littered with failures of an engineering approach – what might be called a ‘hard’ approach to deal with problems that are not in its natural domain.

Problems that involve issues of politics and culture and belief, for instance.

Problems where it’s possible to prove that you can’t prove everything which, if you believe Godel, is the case with any system of logic.

So if you find you’re in a situation where you can’t “engineer” a solution – like how to deal with a problem like Brexit, or what to do about an ageing problem – you have a couple of choices.

The first is to plough ahead with a technical solution anyway – create a committee, set up a negotiating team, create backup plans and so on.

In others words – put systems in place.

Or you could look at the problem for what it is – complex and complicated or even, as Peter Checkland writes, mysterious.

The picture above is adapted from Checkland’s drawing of the hard and soft system approaches – and the basic thing to take away is that when a problem is complex what you can do is be systemic in the way you think rather than trying to make the world systemic.

This is a hard thing to wrap your head around, so let’s try an example.

If you are a manager and have an employee who is not performing what are you going to do?

Speak to HR? Fire the person? Go through a disciplinary process?

You’ve probably got a system – one that’s written out in the manual, one that can be defended if you have to go to court.

This rarely ends well for either party.

This system is also what makes it hard for women with young children to fully participate in work, for people who would like flexible work to get enough and for people to make the most of their talents.

You could argue that the system is broken.

Or you could realise that you just don’t know enough yet.

You don’t know enough about the employee – and why they are not performing.

You don’t know enough about yourself – the way you’re training, coaching and supporting your staff.

What you know is that you have a system and by gosh you’re going to follow it.

A soft approach is not a weak one – just one that realises that real world problems are almost always more complex than you realise.

How scary is the thought that you might need to actually sit down and listen and engage with the employee to understand what’s holding them back and how you can help them?

The thing about such an approach is not that you will get a result – but that you will, in the end, know you’ve done the right thing.

Not just done things right – the way the system tells you to do things.

But done the right thing for the situation you’re faced with right now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Kind Of Prison Are You Keeping Yourself In?

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Tuesday, 9.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I am a poor mendicant. My earthly possessions consist of six spinning wheels, prison dishes, a can of goat’s milk, six homespun loincloths and towels and my reputation, which cannot be worth much. – Mahatma Gandhi

Have you ever wondered how you would pass the time if you were in prison?

Not because you’ve done something wrong and been punished by the state – but because you have done something that you believe in.

Like the people we see in stories in other parts of the world – stories about people protesting for freedom, protesting against their politicians, falling foul of a state, or perhaps as a consequence of conflict – as a prisoner of war.

The point really is not why you’re in prison, but what you’re going to do once you’re there.

This arresting TEDx talk by Captain Charlie Plumb is about the 6 years he spent in captivity in Vietnam.

Six years where he paced three steps up and three steps down – the 8-foot length and width of his prison cell.

If you were in prison, perhaps having books or even pen and paper might make it more bearable.

Surely you could at least be with your own thoughts?

Charlie Plumb didn’t have those.

Neither did Jakow Trachtenberg – who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp – where he came up with his system of mental mathematics to keep himself occupied.

So, how did Plumb make it through the six years he was there – what lessons does he have for the rest of us?

The starting point, he says, is that a prison eight feet long is bigger than the prison 8 inches wide that many people keep between their ears.

Whether you’re trapped in a situation you don’t know how to get out of, or are unsure about what to do next – the things holding you back can often be found in just one place.

You can do three things to escape, Plumb says.

The first thing is to pack a parachute – to be ready physically, mentally, spiritually for what may come.

Prison is a scary place – and yet people throughout history have overcome that fear to make their point.

Gandhi, for example, ate from metal prison dishes even after he was released to show that he was always ready to go back to prison in the service of his cause.

Plumb, as a military officer, had been trained for what he might face – but that didn’t make it any easier.

But being packed must have helped.

The second thing you can do is drop an anchor.

That means having something to hold on to – memories of home, of people. Faith in a higher power.

Something more than yourself – a purpose that flows through you and helps you get through each day one at a time.

And the final thing, he says, is to tug on the wire.

The wire, in his story, is the way the prisoner in the next cell communicated with him.

They had a code they could use to pass messages by moving the wire – and suddenly he had the ability to talk to someone else.

But, at first, he nearly stayed away from the wire – away from something new and risky.

And the lesson there is that when you are given a chance to try something – take it.

Be open to experimenting, to learning, to finding out.

The chances are that we’ll never have to have the same kind of experience – we hope we never have to.

But, if you think about what you would do – you probably can’t help but get stronger inside.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Are You Doing These Things To Develop Your Business?

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Monday, 8.22pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality. – Eliyahu Goldratt

If you go to work every day and focus on what needs to be done then pretty soon you’ll start to lose track of what’s going on outside – what’s happening in the real world out there.

Guy Kawasaki’s book Reality check: The irreverent guide to outsmarting, outmanaging and outmarketing your competition is a collection of lists, Q&As and short pieces covering topics from starting up and raising money to making work less unpleasant.

At the end he has a reality checklist with ten points, out of which I’ve selected six (maybe seven) that are worth asking yourself regularly.

1. Do you make meaning with what you do?

I suppose this is a little like asking what value you provide?

It can be a slightly off-putting question – we probably all agree that teachers, police officers, first-responders and firefighters add value to society.

Every profession, in its own way will argue that it adds value.

Loan sharks, for example, make the argument that they provide credit where no one else will.

But it would be nice if it were possible to do more than that.

If you’re unsure about whether you make meaning right now, just think about it a bit more.

Maybe you just need to discover it for yourself.

2. What curve are you on?

A lot of people start things by looking at the competition – what else is out there?

That’s the red ocean strategy – the one you don’t want to follow.

It’s where there’s lots of competition and the sea is red with creatures fighting each other.

Where you want to be is the blue ocean where there is space and no competition.

Okay, not always.

If you sell a commodity product, you want to be where everyone else is so that people can compare and choose quickly.

This is the world of Amazon and Ebay.

If you do something a little more involved, then you should think hard about where you are on the innovation curve, and whether you can make the leap to an entirely new curve.

3. What’s your mantra?

Kawasaki asks if you have a three-word statement that sums up what you do.

I suppose it doesn’t have to make perfect sense – that’s the point of having time to elaborate on things.

Right now, if I were to have a mantra it would probably be Soft Systems Methodology – a useful approach to understanding and dealing with problematic situations.

4. Can you pitch or demo clearly and quickly?

The saying used to be publish or perish in the academic world.

It’s similar with marketing – you have to create content to explain what you do – with articles and white papers and presentations.

You still need to be able to pitch an idea – explain what you do in a way that people understand.

But even better is showing what you do – it’s now a demo or die world.

You’ll get a lot more enthusiasm if you show people stuff than if you tell them about the cool stuff you can do.

If you haven’t got a demo as part of your marketing package – build one.

5. Can you go to market with no budget?

In The Knack: How street smart entrepreneurs learn to handle whatever comes up Norm Brodsky writes about the business lessons he learned from his father.

Sell with a big markup, he explained. Make sure you can collect from your customer. Be fair – don’t take advantage.

And then the important one – “There’s a million dollars under your shoe; you just have to find it.”

Too many people wait until everything is right before looking for customers.

Start now – because it will take you time and you will be glad you did later.

6. Don’t ask people to do stuff you wouldn’t do

This is the basic rule of management – ask people to do only useful work.

Too many owners and managers ask people to do work that doesn’t create value for a customer.

Keeping timesheets, sending in status updates, form filling, follow processes – we need to ask which of these help with the central task of filling customer demand.

If the customer doesn’t need it doing then don’t do it.

If you own the business and wouldn’t do it yourself if you had a few minutes spare – then is it really worth doing at all?

Look around every once in a while

The point of this list, according to Kawasaki, is to act as a reality check – important points that will get you on the right path.

Because, as he quotes from Indiana Jones, “If you want to be a good archaeologist, you’ve gotta get out of the library!”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why Do Cathedrals Have The Same Basic Plan In Most Places?

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Sunday, 9.00pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned – Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

I have finally gotten around to reading this collection of essays by Fred Brooks – not all of it but what I have read so far is already illuminating.

Take for example, how many people you really need to get a job done.

Say you have a project and you put one programmer on the job.

The task starts looking too big – so you look at adding a person to help.

This will make things go faster, no?

No.

The first thing that Brooks points out is that you can only share out tasks between people when the tasks can be done without the people communicating with each other.

Picking cotton, sorting beads, moving pallets – all these tasks can be done in less time by fewer people.

Supermarkets, for example, get every employee in a store – from the top manager to the entry level clerk – to rumble the place – get every item on the shelf pointing the right way.

But, if you are doing a knowledge based project then communication is essential and communication causes two main problems.

The first problem is one of training. Say you add a person to help your programmer – the first thing the programmer has to do is train the person – and if that takes a week you’re another week behind schedule.

So, never get your existing programmers to train others unless you’re happy to fall behind even more.

Then, when people start to work together the increased need for communication scales exponentially with the number of people.

The more of them you have to talk to the less work gets done.

But you have to work with people – you need teams to get things done.

Here, Brooks points out that big teams with managers don’t work well.

Instead you need small teams and not just that – you need teams organised like surgical teams where you have a surgeon who does the work, an co-surgeon who is learning or can take over and support staff.

The way you work on a big project is by having lots of these surgical teams.

But the way you get them to work in a way that gets you moving in the same direction is to be very clear on the overall architecture.

A cathedral, for example, is pretty much the same wherever go in Europe because of the general design that Jean d’Orbais came up with.

Generations of builders can add their unique approaches and flourishes but within the overarching and coherent design that guides the development.

That approach – having a clear and coherent “what” allows experts to go ahead with the “how” in creative and inventive ways.

Just these three concepts – be wary of adding people to a project, organise yourself like a surgical team and work within an over architecture – alone can transform the way you manage knowledge work.

It goes beyond programming – and can be used pretty much across service industries that rely on using skilled people to deliver a benefit to a customer – it can even help you design a better sales process.

Because the whole point is to create a better experience for your user – your customer.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they looked at what you’d done for them with even a fraction of the wonder they have when they enter a cathedral?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh