Category: Strategy

Saturday, 8.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. – Yogi Berra

I learned a new word today – praxis.

It has a long history – back to Aristotle, it seems.

Aristotle said the work we do results in theory, produces something or is practical.

The reason they are different has to do with the why question – why do we do each type of work?

What’s the purpose behind each one?

If you study maths, say something like number theory, you do it for the sake of the knowledge itself.

For example, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan once explained that the number 1,729 was a very interesting one.

It’s the smallest number you can get to by adding two cubes in two different ways.

Now – you’d want to know that really only for the sake of knowing it.

Although, number theory turned out to have quite a few applications later on – at the time mathematicians like Ramanujan were interested in it really because it was interesting to them – and that was all there was to it.

They’re the folk, I suppose, that contemplate on top of a mountain, and think their way to truth.

At the foothills, you find another sort of folk – productive ones.

People who work close to the earth – making things.

They use techniques – methods that result in something predictable.

Like pots, or washing machines or asphalt.

But then there’s another sort of person – the type Aristotle calls practical, which sounds quite similar to productive but is not the same thing.

The productive person knows what the end goal is.

The practical person doesn’t.

Instead, they face situations – situations where there is no clear answer, no one true way.

They have to use judgement and thought and feel and the kinds of things that aren’t easily expressed clearly as a theory or as a technique.

One way to think of it is as an oscillation, or more visually, a route march from theory to practice and back again.

For example, you might start a new job in a fast growing company.

Experience the joys and stresses of the early days.

And the predictability, higher income and maddening bureaucracy in later years.

All these are experiences that you get while doing productive work.

But do you know why you feel good or bad?

Why you like your job or hate it?

There are simplistic explanations – like most poople leave bosses, not jobs.

And that what’s going on is institutional discrimination.

But then if you get a chance to actually study the theory – you might be introduced to the concept of modern and post-modern organisations – and that gives you a way to understand your experience and perhaps look at it differently.

Something new happens when you use theory to understand what you’ve experienced.

Or when you try and apply theory to improve the situation you are in.

And in turn, use the experience you get by applying theory to look back and improve the theory itself.

That kind of activity is praxis – the journey between theory and practice – the mixing of the two until there is no start or end, just the journey.

And if you want to make a real difference – especially when it comes to important situations – for you personally or for society as a whole – praxis is the way to go.

There’s a reason why theory for theory’s sake is confined in ivory towers.

And a reason why just focusing on the bottom line or the method or the engineering is not enough to solve complex societal issues.

What we need is practical action informed by theory.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. – Wayne Dyer

If you’re trying to build a business or just get ahead in your career how should you think about your job?

Should you turn up and expect to be given work to do and told what sort of training you need?

Or can you take the initiative and figure out what you can do to add value?

But that’s not easy, especially if you’re early in your career or trying to change roles. It can be hard even if you’ve been in a job for a while and get given more responsibility.

Change usually starts, however, with a change in mindset and it might help to start with a model of how a consultant might operate.

Let’s say you go into an organisation as a consultant: it doesn’t matter what kind – marketing, IT, sales – what is it you’re trying to do?

Clients don’t always know what they want or need

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that most people don’t really have a clear idea of what they want or need.

Only the simplest problems can be reduced in that way – most real problems are more complex and there is no right answer.

So one skill you have to develop is to listen to what clients say they want and try to figure out if that’s what they need.

That’s where your experience comes in – and your skill at educating them on the difference between the two.

Look at the big picture

Your value really comes from your ability to look at the big picture – to see how the various elements in the business operate and spot the cracks and flaws and missing pieces.

It’s very easy to get draw into the detail and miss what’s really going on.

And you can only do that by keeping your eyes open and trying to look at the situation from multiple perspectives.

You need to understand the people involved

Perspectives live in people’s minds – and you have to talk to them to see what’s going on.

Whenever there are people working together there is politics – the tensions and fears and desires are always there, simmering below the surface and occasionally bubbling over.

You’ve got to understand the people and figure out which ones matter in which way and how to keep them engaged and informed.

Communication is oxygen

The way you keep people informed and engaged is by communicating – not just for the sake of communicating but because you want them to understand what is going on and tell you early whether they think you’re on the right track or see problems.

Many people won’t speak up until it’s too late – and they won’t speak up unless they feel it’s safe to do so.

All too often you think you’re doing a great job only to find later that other people had a completely different idea of what you were doing.

Suggest a way forward

As a consultant you’re there for your advice – for your thoughts on which direction to go in.

And that means you need to have an idea – based on research and analysis – for what needs to be done next at each stage of the process.

You have to look up from the work, look around and point where you need to go to next.

Be a professional

What does it mean to be a professional?

One way to look at it is that you’re being paid.

But a more important way to look at it is that you’ve committed to deliver – to get the job done.

You’re taking responsibility – a personal one – to see the job through and not just abandon it because the going is tough or things aren’t working out.

Being a professional is about showing up even on the days when you don’t feel like it.

Everyone is a consultant in knowledge work

Work is increasingly about applying knowledge – and that is what consultants do.

If you see yourself – even if you’re employed full time – as a consultant to your employer then you’ll see yourself differently.

You’ll look for ways to add value – even if that means persuading people and changing the system.

And that skill is not a bad one to have.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

The concepts in this post are based on the paper “Consultant or entrepreneur? Demystifying the war for talent” by Stephen Stumph and Walter Tymon Jr.

Saturday, 9.12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. – Henry David Thoreau

Imagine you run a marketing agency.

What do you do when you have to go and see a client?

You create a Powerpoint presentation.

Perhaps a really nice, flashy one – or perhaps a simple one with diagrams.

Which probably look something like the images on the left.

That’s just what people do in business – mainly because other people do that and we need to keep up.

But, as Robert Pirsig writes in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, something happens when you stop looking at the image as a way of saying something and more as a thing in itself.

What you see are perfect shapes – ellipses drawn by a machine, arrows straight and true, text generated by computer.

It’s perfect isn’t it?

And I suppose we hope that the people listening will see all that perfection and realise what we say is true.

And this is important to us because we can’t prove it’s true – not for any activity that involves human activity anyway.

For example, let’s say you have enough money to do a seminar by someone like Tony Robbins – a world-famous coach.

You’ll see words like a proven method in the literature.

Now, to be fair to them, what they mean by proven is tried and tested.

They don’t mean proven in the sense of it has a proof – or evidence of truth.

It’s a technical argument, but bear with me.

If someone says “I’ve tried Tony Robbin’s method and it works” – it’s fair for you to ask “How do you know it wouldn’t have worked if you tried any other way?”

If they say “I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work” it’s equally fair to say “How do you know that you failed because you didn’t do it right?”

There is no answer to either of these questions – and so no way of proving them one way or the other.

In other words the words we use – like proven – and the pictures we use – of perfection – are really a way to convince people to believe what we say is true.

So then look at the picture on the right.

That’s hand-drawn – clearly not symmetrical and clearly not perfect.

It looks like something that is a work in progress – something that you could mark on yourself with a pencil.

And that’s important when trying to actually work on a complex real world problem.

For example, every time I present a perfect presentation like the one on the left to a client I’m painfully aware that this makes me look much more certain than I am.

The reality is that there’s no approach that can just be applied to a company picked at random and be expected to work.

Take content marketing, for example.

Ten years ago some smart people and companies created blogs and content.

Like Seth Godin.

Now there are probably half a billion.

Given that level of competition will that approach still work for companies as a marketing tool?

The only honest answer is that we don’t know – we’ll have to try it and see, with the will to stick it out for ten years.

Why is any of this useful or relevant?

My bet is that we’ll get better and better at doing the perfect stuff with machines.

Just look at how Wix and Canva are killing things like logo design and brand identity.

What humans need to do is work together – and collaborating means being open about we don’t know and sharing work in progress so we can all contribute.

What the left hand picture says is This is what you should do.

The right, I think, says This is what we could try – what do you think?

If I were a marketing consultant selling to you, which approach would you rather I take?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

I feel like reflecting a little today.

They tell you to do that at University – look back at what’s happened to help you learn.

And the reason for this is that this is my five hundredth post – and that seems a good point at which to reflect.

I didn’t really have a plan when I started writing – arguably I still don’t.

The idea was to write – spend time stringing words together trying to make sense of interesting ideas.

I knew that the advice to every writer was you’ll throw the first million away anyway – so you might as well get started.

To date, I’m nearly half way there – if you count the 280,000 words on this blog and stuff that really is just for throwing away.

The fact is that committing to doing something every day inevitably builds something.

It might not be something you had in mind at the start but whatever it is simply builds up over time and, if you’re lucky, compounds.

That means it gets easier – easier to put words together, work through ideas and create something useful – if only for you.

But that thing you create can also be startlingly short lived.

I was following links and came across one that linked to Dennis M. Ritchie’s page at Bell Labs.

Dennis was one of the creators of Unix and his page and links are, to me, a historical artefact – something that should be preserved.

But it wasn’t there.

I looked at the wayback machine and found some of the pages – but there was a sense of disbelief that the material had disappeared.

It turned out, fortunately, that it hadn’t – it had moved a little, but that was all.

Many other pages are not so lucky.

For example, there’s a short piece written by Victor Noagbodji based on an exchange he had with Brian Kernighan – another doyen in the Unix field – on the craft of writing books.

I couldn’t find the original but the wayback machine had a copy.

Still – can that now only be found in an archive?

The ideas in that post are the ones in the picture above – ideas that I find useful and really should be preserved.

For example, if you want to write, then write about something you care about.

If you don’t – you’ll stop. It’s just too hard to keep grinding away at something that you don’t really like.

If you do write – talk about real things and real situations. Made up stuff is ok for fiction but what most people want is something useful.

And that means giving real working examples.

When it comes to programming this is essential – if the example is wrong you’re going to spend hours figuring it out.

The point of writing is not to show how clever you are.

It’s to take someone, even if that someone is you, step by step so that they understand the thing you’re trying to explain.

So having reached this number of posts what have I learned?

Nothing we didn’t know at the start.

• If you want to write – write.
• Write every day.
• Use short words.

These are things you can read in any book about writing.

What matters is the practice – the act of doing.

And I suppose that’s the thing about a practice, especially something you plan to do for the rest of your life.

All you have to do… is do.

Whether that’s remembered is up to other people.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh