Category: Strategy

Monday, 9.13pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself. – Yohji Yamamoto

On Twitter the other day Paul Graham, the founder of Ycombinator, retweeted this – “Be so good they can’t ignore you” can be adjusted to “make something so good that people have to tell their friends about it.”

So, how do you do that?

The bad news is that there are few shortcuts to getting that good.

Or should that be – there are no shortcuts?

There are a few books I’m working through that make this point in different ways.

Joel Spolky in his book Joel on Software starts by reminding us that “Life is just too short to hate your job.”

What you spend your time doing matters more than you realise.

We spend astonishing amounts of time in front of screens – and only some of that time is spent working.

The problem is that most of this time is not “good time” – instead it’s fragmented and disconnected bursts of work pockmarked by interruptions.

And in such a world it’s hard to get things done.

Cal Newport in his book Deep Work points to K. Anders Ericsson’s work which pulled together disparate ideas that were related in a field called Performance Psychology and came up with the term Deliberate Practice as the way to improve performance.

There are two core elements to deliberate practice – focused attention on a task and feedback on how you are doing.

I wonder how many of us find that we have the time to do the former and if we are given the latter in our working environments.

More importantly, do we consider these factors when we’re responsible for training others or even when we’re trying to help our kids get better at something?

The thing about focused attention is that it takes time – weeks are good, days are doable, hours are a minimum.

You are not going to get good work done if you have to rush doing it in five minute intervals.

You need time.

And that means dealing with the things that consume your time – which in this day and age is almost everything around you.

From phones and email to friends and family – they can all be time sinks.

Some of those sinks you want and need – but others do more harm than good.

If you listen to anyone who does work that you like you’ll probably find that they spent a long time getting good at what they do.

It’s clear that Joel Spolsky has spent a lot of time thinking about software.

But the trick, he says, is to start at the foundations of the machine and build up from there.

If you’re into Mr. Men books you should look at some videos of Andy Hargreaves showing you how to draw the characters on YouTube.

It’s hard, he says, to draw circles – and he prefers to draw squares.

You don’t get much more basic than that.

And if you like words there are always those from Churchill on which words to use – “Short words are best, and the old ones, when short, are best of all.”

There is an art to getting better at something – and that is to practice – but practice in the right way with focused attention and feedback.

And if you take the time to do that then what emerges, eventually, may be remarkable enough to share with your friends.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.17pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Too often, Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data. – Adele Revella

In one of his podcasts Jay Abraham tells the story of a friend of his who has trouble dating.

They just can’t find the right person – it seems.

So Jay asks whether the person’s friends know exactly what to look for – and it turns out they don’t.

And, once his friend makes it crystal clear exactly what kind of person fits the bill – dates are lined up very quickly.

Or so the story goes.

So, the lesson is that you should do the same thing when marketing – you just need to know exactly what your perfect customer looks like and you’re off to a good start.

If you do a search for “how to come up with a persona” you’ll find lots of advice that follows traditional segmentation rules.

To save you the trouble of going through the results here are some of the questions you might ask – assuming you’re doing B2B sales.

1. What job do they do?
2. What job do they want to get done?
3. What’s stopping them from getting on with the job?

Or you can do something that looks more like a CV.

1. Name
2. Gender
3. Age
4. Marital status
5. Ethnicity
6. Job title
7. Income
8. Blurb
9. Education
10. Previous roles
11. Job goals
12. Skills
13. Social media use
14. Frustrations

That’s turning into a long list.

Most of the first page of results have some variation on the lists above – and the differences are usually about how they’re arranged on the page and whether you’ve got a photo as well.

When you’ve done all this you’ve described someone on the outside – in terms of what you can see.

An enhanced approach is described by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made To Stick.

In addition to demographic data they look at a case where the marketers also try and build a psychographic profile – where they try and get into someone else’s mind.

What does this person care about? Buy? Do with free time?

When you pull together information like this you end up with what looks like a collage – pieces that make up a person that now exists in your mind.

The thing with these approaches is that you can spend a lot of time building up a detailed picture of a person.

The other approach is to use the Sherlock Holmes technique.

And that is to start by elimination.

Who is not someone who is in the market for what you do?

In a B2B context that probably rules out kids and retired folk.

When you eliminate the impossible, you can go after what’s left.

Now, would I use any of these approaches to develop my own personas for marketing a product or service?

Perhaps – but there might be another, more powerful way.

Two, actually.

The first is to look at people who have already bought from you – or people who have bought the things similar to what you’re selling and try to understand them better.

But better yet is to throw away the personas – and try to have a conversation with the people you haven’t eliminated as ones you could work with.

In the Robert Collier Letter Book, first published in 1931, the author tells you the secret of selling.

“Find the thing your prospect is interested in and make it your point of contact, rather than rush in and try to tell him something about your proposition, your goods, your interests.”

Start by listening and try to understand.

Everything else will flow from there.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. – Marcus Garvey

Yesterday I finished reading Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and started The Four: The hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google and my resulting thoughts were of a cheerless future where we were controlled by these giant corporations and lived under a new Orwellian incarnation of Big Brother.

So, today it was time to go the other way.

Rebel Code, written by Glyn Moody back in 2001 takes us back to the early days of free software and the rise of Linux.

The Wikipedia entry for the book links to an essay by Steven Poole who dismisses Linux writing it’s “never going to be a mass-market consumer operating system like Windows or Mac OS.”

He goes on: “If you just want to use your computer for word-processing, web surfing or whatever, you’d better avoid it like the plague.”

And he’s right – In this snippet of video Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, says that it really annoys him that the desktop is the last holdout of Windows and Mac.

It has taken over everything else.

It’s just that most people don’t see what’s going on because all they see is what comes up when they turn their computer on in the morning.

Torvalds argues that the biggest problem is that computers don’t come pre-installed with Linux – they come with Windows.

Android phones run on Linux – but the software comes with them. Users don’t need to go through the pain of installation and figuring out all that computer stuff – so they stick with the default, which on the desktop is Windows or MacOs for most people.

As we head towards 2020 the skirmishes between the free software/open source movement and closed software are starting to become part of the historical record.

You have Neal Stephenson’s In the beginning was the command line, and Eric S. Raymond’s collection of writing.

And, of course, you have the GNU project books and, in particular, the essays of Richard Stallman.

And, when in doubt, one should probably go back to Stallman’s views on all this.

And that’s because he uses a very simple rule – one that makes thinking about almost everything so much easier.

The thing that bothered me when thinking yesterday about the way key technologies marketed today work is that they are all centrally controlled by an all-powerful commercial organisation.

AI, Big Data and the Cloud are all, at their core, ways to centralise control over computing.

Stallman’s simple rule is that software should be free – free as in freedom.

From the GNU philosophy:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

This is not a 50% rule or a 90% rule but a 100% rule – and it’s only aim is to protect your freedom to do your computing in the way you want.

To keep up with changing technology Stallman writes:

“On the internet, proprietary software isn’t the only way to lose your freedom. Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, is another way to let someone else have power over your computing. SaaSS means using a service implemented by someone else as a substitute for running your copy of a program.”

For many people this is a non-issue – who cares?

As someone that comes from a relatively young democracy – I find the concept and importance of freedom perhaps more important – which affects the way I think about and do my computing.

The Indian flag has a wheel at its centre. Mahatma Gandhi had proposed a spinning wheel originally because he saw that simple device as a way to recognise the dignity of labour.

Back in 1921 the thing that mattered was giving people a way to earn a living through labour – and through that giving them dignity and a place in society.

Today, as we debate the effects of automation on jobs we would do well to remember that computers are the equivalent of spinning wheels for many people – the way we learn and work and make a living.

In India, the spinning wheel is inextricably linked with the independence movement – and freedom.

For those of us lucky enough to be free now – free software helps us keep it that way.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 6.40pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Trust equals consistency over time – Jeff Weiner, CEO LinkedIn

A friend and I were talking about different types of jobs.

Not jobs exactly, but roles – and why different people end up in different roles and often very different situations.

Take a young person at the start of a career, for example.

They might start a low paid job, perhaps one that’s based on shifts.

They might get something that fits with their skills and willingness to learn – but comes with an entry level salary.

Talent, as Felix Dennis wrote, can be underpaid for a while provided the work is challenging enough.

Dennis quotes Degas as saying “Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.”

So, how do they move up in the world?

Change jobs, goes the advice.

Move on every 18 months and find a new, better paid role.

That’s the way to get experience in a sector or industry.

It seem that the best way to earn more money, if that’s what you want, is to jump ship often – and quickly you’ll earn more than the ones left behind.

The same logic applies perhaps the idea of skipping university and heading straight into work.

Why spend time studying when you could spend time working and making money?

After ten years or so, something different happens.

Some of the people who’ve stayed at a place for a while have worked their way up a ladder.

They’re insiders.

The ones who have moved from place to place are visitors.

And the nature of such relationships don’t seem to vary that much.

When you get a new colleague it takes some time to get to know them.

It’s easy when it’s transactional and they just need to do what they’re told.

But, given a choice between someone who you’ve worked with for ten years and someone you’ve worked with for six months – who do you know better?

Which one would you trust?

Well, it probably depends on how they have acted over that time.

Some people are dependable workers, turning out the same thing time after time on time.

Some are creative mavericks, who come up with different things all the time, but who deliver on time.

And then there are the ones that don’t.

The fact is that it doesn’t matter if you’re an insider or a visitor.

What matters is what you do.

People who stay in one place are trusted not because they stayed but because they did consistent work over that time.

The ones who didn’t are the ones you’re trying to move on – but they can’t find a role anywhere else.

If you’ve moved around your track record will get you an interview.

But after that you’ve got to show what you can do to build trust.

The ideal, really, is to start work at a place you’d be happy to spend the next twenty years because the work is interesting and challenging.

Over time, you’ll probably get paid what you’re worth.

Maybe a little less.

But at least you’ll be learning every day.

And you’ll probably have the trust of people around you.

There are few things that suck more than having to go to a well-paid job that you hate.

And this is the hard thing to tell young people – and you probably wouldn’t have listened when you were that age as well.

Choose your first job carefully.

If you think that’s not very good advice you should listen to what Bertrand Russell suggested you should try and do.

Choose your parents wisely.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.36pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers – Seth Godin

In Hit Refresh, a glimpse into the mind of Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, we see how hard it is to reconcile old and new ways of thinking.

For centuries, millennia perhaps, power and property have been inextricably entwined.

Those with property had rights – and the rest did not.

For example, only those with land had a vote in early experiments with democracy.

As the definition of property expanded from a narrow view of land and fences to a version of the law that allowed you to own mineral rights and computer code, you started seeing the concept of capital – the idea of owning assets.

These days it’s not uncommon to think about everything in terms of who owns it.

But, at the same time, capital is starting to lose value because there is just so much of it.

Once upon a time, if you had access to capital you could build a factory, pay people a pittance and make yourself even richer.

And, perhaps as the world’s only licensed producer of wool or steam locomotives, you were able to control markets as well, dictating terms to buyers.

That sort of business still goes on but in places further away.

These days, however, almost every physical thing you buy lives two lives.

One is as a commodity, with a price effectively equal to the cost of production.

And the other is as a brand – where you pay to feel a certain way.

For example, you can get knock off headphones for Apple devices for very little money or you can pay a lot of money for the official ones.

There’s very little difference in the innards – they’re all made and glued together in the same place – possibly in the same factory.

So what makes the difference – why doesn’t everyone just buy the cheapest product?

A clue is in Nadella’s book where he tells colleagues that what they get to own is a customer scenario, not the code.

Putting aside businesses that make things – this is an insight that service businesses would do well to mull over.

In a service business you depend on a combination of people, process and technology to help your customers.

None of those things offer a sustainable competitive advantage.

The chances are that your people are just as good as everyone else – you don’t tend to find teams where one company somehow has people twice as clever as everyone else.

Having a good process is something you take for granted – if it doesn’t work the customer will let you know by taking their business elsewhere.

And technology is available everywhere – quite possibly for free.

The fact is that there is no shortage of people who can do what you want – all they ask is that you tell them exactly what you want them to do.

And if you do know what you want – then you’re in search of a commodity.

Make a list, ask people to quote and pick the cheapest quote – that’s the way to make sure you buy what you want at pretty much the cost of production.

But if you don’t know what you want – when there are a number of things floating about in your head – what you’re looking for is help turning that into a scenario.

That scenario is the thing that will solve your problem, improve your business or move in the right direction.

From a service provider’s point of view, if they can “own” that scenario they’ve got something that you’ll buy.

In theory then, owing a customer scenario is the best asset you can have – because that’s the value that the customer gets in exchange for the money they give you.

Although, now that I reflect on that, I’m not sure you can really “own” a customer scenario.

The customer owns that.

If you ask them nicely they might lend it to you – so you can show them how you’d go about solving it.

And then, if you’ve built up enough trust, they’ll consider working with you over someone else.

Maybe the real asset you should try and build is your ability to appreciate what other people want.

And then, as Zig Ziglar said, “you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.15pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps. – David Lloyd George

I was watching a TEDx talk by Dr Benjamin Hardy who talked about his research into wannabe entrepreneurs and actual entrepreneurs.

The one difference between the two, he said, was that the actual entrepreneurs had experienced a point of no return – something from which there was no going back, while the wannabes hadn’t.

This is an interesting concept – an appealing one and a dangerous one – a concept you should approach with caution.

On the one hand many of us are in jobs that we’d like to leave.

Maybe we want to start a new business or pursue a different career or talent, and surely it’s only by taking the decision – committing to a new way of life – that you’ll make any progress?

After all, is the only memory you want to have of your life one of regret?

So, if you’re in that situation, don’t you have to believe in yourself – believe in your ability to take the leap and get to the other side?

We read so many stories of just that happening – but at the same time we need to remember that stories are written only about those that reached the other side.

The rest fell, and were forgotten.

Survivorship bias stalks such stories.

Hardy’s research probably controls for this bias but it’s hard to imagine that there are many entrepreneurs who take part in interviews to talk about how they failed time after time.

But then there are other kinds of leaps – after all, not all leaps have to be ones that show up in dramatic announcements.

You don’t have to quit your job, move to Silicon Valley, invest all your savings or mortgage everything you own and go all in on your dream.

A leap can happen just in your mind.

In her book, Thinking in systems, Donella H. Meadows writes about an experiment she does with classes.

She takes a slinky out of a box, holds it from the top in one hand, resting it on the palm of the other.

She them takes away her hand and the free end of the slinky drops, bouncing up and down until it comes to rest.

She asks the class why the slinky behaves the way they did.

The answers come fast – “Because you took your hand away.”

She then picks up the box the slinky came in and does the same thing with that, holding it in one hand, resting it on the other.

She takes her hand away and nothing happens.

Her point is that it’s the nature of the slinky that makes it act the way it does – not the hand.

The behaviour is a property of the system – not of its environment.

And this gives us a hint off the kind of leap we need to make in our minds.

If we want to change things then we have to start by changing ourselves.

Changing things that are outside us amounts to fiddling with the environment.

If we change our jobs, locations or investments, we’ve changed the things around us but if we are no different aside we’re heading for failure – because the chasm still exists when we take the run up.

When we’re ready the chasm disappears – maybe just because we’ve now found where the bridge happens to be.

Cheers.

Karthik Suresh