Russell Davies

March

March 2015 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

.everyone

.everyone 

82-88

Slow but influential

"But I’ve come to see that the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world."

Everything is made up

 

Don't confuse planning with strategy

This interview with Roger Martin is all good.

But, the best bits:

Don't mistake non-choices for strategy

'The very essence of strategy is explicit, purposeful choice. Strategy is saying explicitly, proactively: "We're going to do these things and not those things for these reasons."

The problem with a lot of strategies is that they are full of non-choices. Probably most of us have read more than a few so-called strategies that say something like, "Our strategy is to be customer centric." But is that really a choice?

You only know that you've made a real strategic choice if you can say the opposite of what that choice is, and it's not stupid. So, think about 'customer centric.' The opposite would be what? We ignore our customers? How does that work? Can you point out many companies that succeed and make lots of money ignoring their customers? Well, then being customer centric is not a strategic choice.

Here's another example: "We're going to be operationally effective. We're going to show attention to execution." You see these sentences all the time in strategies, but they're not strategic choices. Always think of the opposite. "We're not going to be operationally effective." If the opposite is stupid and is demonstrated by the fact that nobody who's had any kind of success has ever done it, then it's not strategy. You get a little bit of credit for that—like getting a D-minus grade—but I would hope that most nonprofits aspire to be greater than that.

I often use the mutual fund industry as an example of where the leading players have made real choices. Vanguard's founder John Bogle says, "Picking stocks is stupid. It's bad for the investors. It wastes their money. Just buy index funds." That's all Vanguard offers. How do we know it's non-stupid, that it has a strategy? Because Fidelity says the opposite, "Portfolio managers are the absolute heart of the strategy. We put together portfolios that are customized to our clients' needs." So we have two super successful mutual fund companies making the opposite choices. That's strategy, and that's what you should seek.

Don't confuse planning with strategy

What happens too often is that cyclical planning overtakes strategy development.

This is because setting strategy is an art form, but it comes with a lot of bureaucratic baggage, and often the baggage gets ahead of making the purposeful choices. We know we have to organize things. We know we have to tell people what they're going to do. We know we have to have and budget for initiatives. So, developing strategy ends up being an exercise in agglomerating initiatives, assigning responsibilities without a coherent set of choices that help bind them.

I would argue that 90 percent of the strategic plans I've seen in my life are really more accurately described as budgets with prose. Lots of prose at the front end of a budget. In some sense, that's a better budget than simply a budget that has only numbers. But it's still a budget; it isn't a strategy.'

Enlightenment

Bad service dreams

I had a bad service experience today.

I rushed to my next meeting, burning with righteous fury and started telling the first person I saw about it. And the then I saw the look on their face; 90% terror and 10% sympathetic boredom. And I realised that telling someone your bad service experience is maybe even worse than telling them your dreams.

It made me wonder why service experiences and dreams are so conversationally poisonous.

I think it's for similar reasons.

There's a sense that absolutely anything can happen, there are no logical boundaries, so there's no narrative constraint. But the experience is flooded with emotion, emotion that seems vastly out of proportion to what actually happened.

It's all in the past and there's nothing that anyone can do about any of it anyway, so there's no point thinking about it.

And, somehow, bad service experiences and dreams always seem hallucinatory in the telling - and this happened, then this happened, then this - like someone's just making things up. They're literally unbelievable.

So I've resolved not to tell you about it. But, still, grrrrr.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible

Just finished reading Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Very good.

This was a good little bit of jargon/usage/language.

"My first boyfriend. Back home in Donbas. That was love. He was a local authority.’ Authority is a nice word for gangster."

This feels true:

"And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism."

And this:

"Everyone here drove the latest models. They might have their toilets in wooden outhouses, and their flats might be yellowing, but the big, black cars were always shining with a TV-commercial sparkle. Stas took us to a meet at which locals showed off how they’d upgraded their automobiles. One guy had installed a jacuzzi in the back; another had a movie theatre. There was tenderness in how they showed off their prized possessions. These heavy men touched their cars so delicately. Stas took out a little toothbrush to clean the headlights on his Land Cruiser: he scrubbed it softly, patiently, as if he was washing a toddler."

And:

"The governor himself was large and bald and always sweating. ‘I went to Poland recently,’ he told Benedict the only time they met. ‘I saw them making ketchup in cement mixers. That’s the sort of innovation we need here."

More good jargon:

"Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, grey cardinals, Wizards of Oz."

 

 

North Bay and Cafe, Scarborough

75-81