“I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned.”

You couldn’t make it up. A man disappears in 1986; is declared legally dead in 1994; reappears in 2005. And the judge, calling it a “strange, strange situation”, found that death rulings cannot be overturned after three years.   There’s no more raising Lazarus from the dead, not with today’s Pharisees. Especially if you’ve been dead three years or more.

Sometimes the problem is not with returning from the dead, there’s a more fundamental issue at stake. In some places it’s illegal to die. Yup, death is prohibited.

A few years ago, we went to Aiguebelle for our summer vacation, far from the madding crowd. And the nearest town was Le Lavandou. Which you could get to on the “road train” pictured above. And so we did. While we were there, I looked up Wikipedia to learn more about the place. It turned out that A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square was written in a bar there.

It also turns out that it’s illegal to die there. The mayor called it “absurd… to counter an absurd situation”.

Le Lavandou’s not alone. Apparently the Greeks of Delos beat them to it by about 2500 years, and there have been many others since.

Not being allowed to die. Once dead, not be allowed to come back. Predictable phenomena in a world of letter rather than spirit, a topic I’ve had the opportunity to delve into time and time again. Some decades ago, as part of my investigations, I was pointed towards the works of Michael Polanyi in this regard, particularly in the context of things tacit and things explicit. His “we can know more than we can tell” mantra resonated with me, and helped me understand something about the challenges of formulating workable law in any sphere.

Influenced by my upbringing (Brahmin family, Jesuit schooling and university, all in cosmopolitan Calcutta) and by my teenage reading habits (which included a healthy dose of Asimov, not just the fashionable Foundation series, but, more relevant to this context, the Robot series), I had become a firm believer in spirit-not-letter, that the intent of the law or principle or guidance was what really mattered.

Asimov believed that we all needed to understand why the spirit-versus-letter argument was going to become more and more important, particularly as we moved towards a posthuman society. It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Robots can do “letter” with their eyes closed. But spirit? That’s a whole ‘nother deal. [Incidentally, if you’re interested in this topic, you should go read Sage Leslie-McCarthy’s paper on Asimov’s Posthuman Pharisees; it is excellent].

Polanyi believed that our tacit dimension included tradition, inherited practices, implied values and prejudgments. We live in a time of intense change, and often we throw much of this to the four winds in the name of progress. But we have to be careful. Amidst all the bathwater of tradition there’s a baby that may be worth keeping.

Implied values.

Some of those implied values are part of what makes us us.

That’s what I believe George VI was referring to when he said:

Sometimes, we behave “in a way which would not do if generally adopted“. It is something that every one of us is capable of, something we need to watch for.

So I get concerned when Stuart Broad doesn’t walk, deciding that the letter of the law had suddenly become more important than the spirit. In cricket, there is nothing more important than spirit.

It’s not just in cricket. Spirit matters.

Throughout the Cold War, there appeared to be a tacit rule that spies did what they did as part of statecraft while carefully avoiding any accusation of spying on commercial grounds alone. That rule is now being declared irrelevant and unworkable.

There used to be an unwritten rule that governments didn’t spy on their own citizens unless they had demonstrable cause.

There used to be an unwritten rule that the role of elected officials was to serve their electors, to “govern”; to debate law while it was formed, then to uphold law once it was passed; where law needed changing, to use the process of law to change the law.

These unwritten, tacit rules were part of the fabric of society. An “understanding of things we knew but could not tell”, formed over millennia.

We are moving headlong into a society where we have to learn to teach robots to be human as they drive cars and operate drones and perform surgery and make our hearts work.

We need to be careful.

Because we could also be moving headlong into a society where we forget how to be human, and become primitive robots instead, unable to tell spirit from letter.

Spirit matters.

 

 

Each year I try and spend a night out underneath the stars to try and experience, in a tiny and vicarious way, what the homeless face. It’s for a charity close to my heart, Action for Children. The event is called Byte Night, and this Friday hundreds of people all over the country will join us in raising money for Action for Children.

Last year was an interesting experience. It rained. And rained. And rained. The non-swimmer in me wasn’t perturbed, but another hour or two and I may have been.

This year, sadly, I won’t be amongst the sleepers-out this Friday, wet or not. I’m unavoidably away on business, and we haven’t yet invented the transport that can get me back from the US on time.

But that doesn’t stop my colleagues from spending Friday night on the banks of the Thames. It doesn’t stop them hoping and praying that the weather is somewhat better than last year.

It doesn’t stop me donating to the cause.

I hope it doesn’t stop you. Please give. And give generously.

Here’s the link.

Thank you.

Coda: I will, in conjunction with some of my colleagues, be running some other events this year in order to augment what we raise for this. Watch this space.

 

 

Every now and then something happens and you realise the world’s getting smaller, more connected, somehow overlapping in strange and wonderful ways.

There I was last night, quietly putting my feet up after a satisfyingly hectic week. I’d gone out for a wedding anniversary dinner with my wife (our 29th), and we were enjoying one of those companionable silences that can only be enjoyed by people who’ve spent lives with each other, reading peacefully. And then I remembered something I needed to do before going to sleep. It involved my having to leave the bedroom and go online.

Which I did. And I noticed that a good friend and erstwhile colleague had sent me a FollowFriday recommendation:

He’s known me for a long time, and he knew that the Gerald Waller 1946 photograph was something that meant a lot to me. No surprise it’s been my Twitter background since Twitter had backgrounds. No surprise I’ve written about it years ago.  I’ve met many people who like that photograph, so the #ff didn’t make me jump into action.

So Stu decided to press home the point:

 

He didn’t stop there either. He went on to share a youtube link with me, one that featured the musician in question, Nicki Wells (@nickiwellsmusic)

Then Saturday came along, I went about my chores, settled down for the afternoon. And watched the video. Liked the music, carried on.

And then stopped. Thought I recognised the drummer. Rewind. Replay. And there he was.

My nephew. Jivraj Singh.

Coincidence? I guess so. But that world’s getting smaller, the connections are getting more and more wonderful.

That made me call up his mother and speak to her, and I found out more about what Jivraj is up to now. Rolling Stone had already told me he was working on five different album projects.

For some reason, I’d missed learning about the Chaiwalla Sessions with Nischay Parekh. Big miss. Big mistake. Now corrected. Now I’m hooked. To Jivraj Singh, to Nischay Parekh, to Nikki Wells. To Nitin Sawhney.

Don’t make my mistake. Go listen to them. Go listen.

Coincidences. They make the world go round.

 

 

I was born in 1957. A long time ago. And that meant I grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies, in an India that was teenage in its independence. [In fact, when I was born, Goa still belonged to Portugal, albeit only since its annexation over four hundred years earlier.]

They were times of tumult and of transformation, of triumph as well as tragedy. Change everywhere. Change at incredible speed. Change with long-lasting consequences. Women entering parliament and even becoming heads of state; racism being tackled head-on for the first time; valves being replaced by transistors; man going into space; man landing on the moon; computers beginning to be exploited commercially, the mouse and the pointer being invented, personal computing becoming a possibility, the internet beginning to take shape. Mobile phones entering the fray; e-mail rearing its ugly head. Protest movements everywhere, people fighting to be heard, people fighting for their rights. Fighting against colour prejudice, against gender inequality. Fighting for the right to choose and for the right to live. Affordable international travel, leading to greater mobility across the world. Assassinations, hijackings, the beginnings of modern terrorism. Entire countries dying, and new ones coming up, as the last vestiges of five hundred years of European colonialism came to an end. War. And peace. And some of the finest music ever produced.

By the time I was 14 years old change, and rapid transformational change at that, was a constant in my life.

I’ve spent the next 40-odd years observing change, being part of that change, changing myself. And sometimes even trying to change some of the world around me.

For some reason, quite early on, I began perceiving each wave of change, regardless of its locus and coverage, as something separate in itself. Compartmentalising the change in order to make sense of it. Seeing each change as an individual thing, with something I could identify as a start, something I could identify as an end, some people involved in making the change happen, some people involved in leading that change. Starts and ends, reasons and goals, resources and costs and times and outcomes.

Yes. I confess. I viewed much of the change around me as a set of projects, sometimes interwoven, sometimes overlapping, sometimes gloriously isolated.

All projects involve change. All change meets inertia. And there’s always some risk as a result. A lot of the time, changes begin without everyone really knowing what the desired end-state is. Which means you have the skills and knowledge for the start of the project and, in all likelihood, you have to figure things out as you go along. Discover stuff. Learn, usually from mistakes. Adjust, refine. Move on. Sense and learn and respond. Again and again. Iterating until you reach where you need to be. The persistence of Robert the Bruce. The perspiration that lubricates inspiration. If you keep on at it, learning as you go, then, in Yoda fashion, you get to there-is-no-try-only-do.

That’s what projects are. Each project is a try that becomes a do as you iterate and refine and adjust and learn. Most of the time, change takes you to a place where you’ve never been; sometimes, it takes you to a place that nobody’s ever been. So discovery and learning and iteration become critical.

As you scale from one-person projects to larger ones, some sort of governance model becomes necessary. A process for agreeing priorities, for allocating resources to the tasks, for monitoring progress and getting feedback, and for intervention in the event of problem or conflict. [I chose not to use the word “failure” in that set. I have not failed, I have found ten thousand ways that do not work…]

Most projects start with constrained resources. Anecdotally speaking, the projects I’ve enjoyed the most have been those with hard constraints. Such projects tend to attract people-who-want-to-govern-inspect-or-otherwise-give-their-opinion in droves. Droves and droves. Advice and support and help are always useful,  provided you know how to use them. There’s a serenity prayer in there somewhere.

Some people may come to praise the “project”, some to bury it. You can’t do anything about it, it’s a hazard of business. But what you can do is this: you can figure out whether the person in question could help you decide on the right thing to do, or about doing things the right way.

In my own experience, there are many many people who can tell you how to do things the right way.

But a rare few who can help you work out the right thing to do. They’re keepers.

George Gilder used to say that every economic era is characterised by its unique abundances and scarcities, and that a successful business is one that makes use of both the abundances as well as the scarcities.

So that’s what I’ve tried to do in projects. Corral together the people who can help me do things the right way, convert their energy into repeatable process, build bureaucracies around them as and when needed, just to contain the sheer numbers and make things efficient. A QWERTY keyboard approach to prevent logjam.

And then I’ve tried to spend as much time as possible identifying, nurturing, developing the people who can tell me the right thing to do. The rare and the scarce. The keepers.

Which is why, when I look at governance models in companies, sometimes I have to smile wryly.

Startups tend to be hungrily looking for people who can help them ensure the right things are done. And they call them mentors and coaches and advisors.

Established companies tend to be looking, somewhat less hungrily, for people who can help them ensure that things are done the right way. And they call them NEDs.

Abundances and scarcities. It’s important to know which is which.

 

 

Have you ever been put off shopping by an over-zealous assistant? If you have, then have you considered how you feel when that over-zealous assistant is not flesh-and-bone but instead only in digital form? Some people find the analogue version an irritant; yet others groan at the digital equivalent. And so that brings me to Customer Rule #1: Don’t hassle me while I’m just looking; not unless I ask you for help.

 

 

This does not mean that store assistants are unwanted. In fact they provide a really worthwhile function, as long as they know useful stuff about the store: where you go to find stuff; where you can try stuff, test stuff, compare stuff; how you buy; how you pay; how you take delivery; anything and everything. But only when you want it. I think of store assistants as analogue equivalents of search boxes, and often nicer to deal with. But I wouldn’t want the search engine in my face except at my behest. And this brings me to Customer Rule #2: When I ask for help, please make sure you’re in a position to help. Especially if you’re a search box. Too often I visit the search function of a site and it can’t find zip. Even though what I’m looking for is on the site.

 

 

If you’re in the business of selling stuff, then people who come and browse till the cows come home and never buy anything can be the bane of your life. And so there are a bunch of ways you can get your own back on the customer. You can leave fragile things in easy-to-knock-into places, under a big sign that says if you break it you pay for it. You can seal things so that they’re hard to inspect. You can place them “behind glass”. You can even try and get people to pay for browsing, with a “just looking” fee. These are all excellent techniques to use … if your goal is to frustrate the customer. We’ve all felt this pain in the real world: the harder you make it for me to find something, to get to something, the less likely it is that I’ll buy something. And so we have Customer Rule #3: Make sure there is a good reason for putting your products and services “behind glass”.

 

It’s not just the products and services that get put behind glass. Sometimes it’s the doors and entryways. Businesses love their customers so much that they put them through some sort of benighted IQ test before they can buy stuff. Want to enter our site? Prove you’re not a machine. [Alan Turing would have found that interesting, the idea of a human having to prove he’s human via a test]. I love the way Randall Munroe makes that point in his excellent xkcd webcomic:

 

 

Think about this: how many telephone numbers do you remember “by heart” right now? And how many did you know twenty years ago? We used to have to memorise lots of numbers at one time; now we don’t have to any more. When we want someone’s number, we look up the person’s name. Nothing complicated about it. And, most of the time, we don’t even need to see that number, we just click and away we go. That’s what we started doing when mobile devices started getting smarter.

So the next time you ask a customer to remember twelve or sixteen digits as a prerequisite for her doing business with you, think about what you’re doing. Why not ask them to recite pi to 16 digits before she is “allowed” to buy something from you, or, heaven forfend, try and pay a bill….. try and pay you some money? Which leads me to Customer Rule #4: Try not asking customers to memorise stuff about you; instead, try to remember stuff about them.

 

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve walked in to a shop, both online as well as off-, only to be put off by all the stuff I have to do before I can actually buy something. Most of the time I’ve had one reaction. A predictable reaction. I’ve just walked away and found somewhere else to go about my business. Registration should be something lightweight and simple. Time for Customer Rule #5: If you make it hard for customers to do business with you, don’t be surprised if they fail in the attempt.
People have done business with each other for centuries, even millennia. They buy from each other, they sell to each other. They do so principally because they trust each other, because they’ve bothered to invest in a relationship between each other, because they have some understanding and some respect for each other.

Over those millennia, they’ve evolved ways of doing this simply and effectively. For some reason, we seem to think we can treat people differently in digital space.

Maybe we can. Maybe for some people it doesn’t matter. For me it matters. I want people to make it simple and convenient for me to do business with them. And if they don’t, I will find people who do.

How about you? Do you agree with what I’ve said? Does it match with your experience and expectation? Let me know. Your comments will determine whether I write a follow-up post on queueing time and baskets and trolleys and payment and delivery and all that….. or not, as the case may be.