Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

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What will make the difference in 2020?

The start of a year. The start of a decade. Everyone’s pumped and ready to make their mark. But before you charge head first into a frenzy of activity, take a moment and think about what will truly make a difference in 2020.

Better management

If you improve at one thing this year, let it be management. You can always be better and nothing has more of an impact than good management. Whether it’s line management of one person or a team. No matter if you work in a start up with five people or a big company of thousands. Management is the difference maker.

Upwards management. Peer management. Line management. Expectation management. It’s all about working with people and contributing to an organisation’s culture. So influence the setting of objectives, help to build the consensus to achieve them, and foster a commitment within the team to deliver them.

Good managers create teams that are greater than the sum of their parts.

We’ve all had terrible managers and we’ve all had wonderful ones, so we should all know the impact that good management has on lives, on careers and on work. And that truly is the power of good management: getting a team to deliver collectively what it could not do individually. Good managers create teams that are greater than the sum of their parts. Invest your time in being better, and then focus on being better still.

Remembering that the what is as important as the why

In the past decade a lot of time and effort was spent on why. Why do we do things? What’s our purpose? What drives us? All important questions. But we shouldn’t let that get in the way of thinking about the whats. As in: what are people actually doing? What are they buying? What are we trying to achieve?

This is all practical stuff. And being practical is the difference maker. So define your purpose, but also deliver it. Want to help protect the environment? Set out a plan to do it and then do it.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) need to be hit by 2030, the UN is calling this the decade of delivery. It’s all about sorting out what we’re doing not why we’re doing it. You should’ve sorted out the why by now.

Now let’s bring this down from the high levels of climate change and global advancement. The what is equally important whether you’re shifting product, generating leads or influencing legislation. Being practical will set you apart. So focus on it. Spend more time developing plans than strategy.

Delivering

That leads us nicely on to the most important thing to do this year: deliver stuff. Want to do stand out work? Do it. Commission it. Sell it. Get it out there. Be as ambitious as you like, but make sure you actually deliver stuff. Outcomes trump outputs, but you tend to get no outcomes without outputs. That’s an awful sentence, but I know you understand it. It’s good enough. It delivers. Make sure you deliver too.

Bonus tip

All this stuff will still be true next year and the year after. It was true last year too.

Variations on a theme (2): Economist ads

For copywriters, The Economist’s “white out of red” ads are the supreme example of the power of good commercial writing. They are witty, sharp and knowing.

I think most copywriters will, at some point or other, have attempted to write their own version. I know I have. More than once, in fact. I’ve had another bash now. The results are below.

Think rhymes with drink

The first two variations fall around the simple fact that think rhymes with drink. So I’ve taken some fairly common end-of-the-week refrains and tweaked them to focus on the newspaper’s print publication day.

Knowledge at work

Nothing will ever be as clever as the management trainee ad. These two follow in its footsteps of trying to capture the value to your career of being well-informed.

A play on words

This is probably the most original of the variants I’ve created. It’s simple word play.

Grime

Grime is incredibly popular among creatives. It’s being used to flog everything from rum to furniture. Perhaps it could sell newspapers too? Apologies to Stormzy for this one.

A quick final note to emphasise two points. Firstly, I’m not a designer so I know the typesetting will upset many people but tough cookies. And secondly, I didn’t have the right font so I used Cambria, which I know isn’t the best substitute but, again, tough cookies.

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The Virtue Signaller

 I am the lighthouse,
 Beaming through cracked phone screens,
 Saving followers from jagged opinions and twittersqualls,
 Silhouetting moral wrecks with righteous indignation,
 Blazing down upon sunken souls,
 Whose sharp-edged misery,
 Might breach your moral purity.
  
 I am the lighthouse,
 I send my light and my truth,
 Let me bring you to my pure shore.

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My soundtrack to the M3; 2019 in audiobooks

I drive a lot. And I mean a lot. Over 20,000 miles a year. Most of it on the M3. So I listen to audiobooks. These days, I go through audiobooks like British governments go through elections: relentlessly.

So this is a run through of the books I’ve listened to this year.

The year in numbers

BooksDaysHoursMinutes
18102045

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Sashi Tharoor

This book is the offspring of YouTube. When Tharoor spoke at the Oxford Union about the rapaciousness of the Empire, he became an internet sensation. Four years and six million views after that video appeared, this book pushes the same arguments in greater detail. It’s not a dispassionate analysis and doesn’t pretend to be. It is, however, a very well made argument.

NW, Zadie Smith

I’m not huge on fiction (which I know is a failing) but I will always make time for Zadie Smith. She writes about the parts of London I grew up in and her characters feel like old friends. NW is a series of short stories and every one of them is enjoyable. I highly recommend it.

Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell

I didn’t read this when it became a hit. It always sat on the list of books I really ought to read. I’m glad I got round to it. It’s deceptively simple. It’s engaging and it hammers home how much success is dependent on circumstance.

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, William Dalrymple

Dalrymple became a must-read author for me after I read his City of Djinns. He captures people and places in a way few others can. There’s an underlying enthusiasm that is infectious. This isn’t a book I’d revisit, if I’m honest. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed a closer exploration of a bit of the history of a part of the world we hear about but few of us really know.

Becoming, Michelle Obama

If you don’t think Michelle is the best Obama, this book will change your mind. The overall impression I got from this book was one of honesty. This felt like a warts-and-all account. Obama doesn’t pretend to be perfect. She’s open about hard times and her feelings about them. This is the best book I listened to this year.

The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj, Anita Anand

A personal tale of revenge and a spotlight on the violent side of the struggle for Indian independence. I really enjoyed this book. What really brought it home to me was how prevalent the tale is in Punjab.

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream, Paulo Coelho

Another book I didn’t read when it was hitting the bestseller lists. Short. Simple. Yet deep, deep. Really deep. And excellently read too. I listened to it twice.

The White Tiger, Arvind Adiga

The dark side of India’s now spluttering economic boom. A bright but poor lad goes from village to city to murderer to entrepreneur. The characters are vivid. The story compelling.

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

I’ll admit I only listened to this because it was going to be on the telly. I’m glad I did. Would it be career limiting to say that the illogical catch 22 situations feel very relevant to modern corporate life (albeit with little to nothing of value at stake)?

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

I wanted to love this. I certainly learnt a lot. But it went on. And it jumped around. I think if I’d tried to crack it as a physical book I would have enjoyed it more. It requires and deserves your attention.

Winter Pilgrims: Kingmaker, Book 1, Toby Clements

An attempt at historical fiction. I won’t be repeating it.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries

This year, I worked on a special project. We worked lean. So I listened to this to get under the skin of the idea. It was good. I’m naturally cynical about books that generally fall into the “self-help” category, which I suspected this did. It was good though. It builds very much on the Kanban processes from Japan. It did make me think and I have implemented some of its thinking into my team permanently.

For the Record, David Cameron

30 hours in a car with David Cameron talking about himself. Ouch. Why did I do it? Well, I wanted to understand him a little better. And if I’m honest, it’s left me more kindly disposed to him than I was before. He strikes me as someone who is very kind to his friends, wants to do the right thing and, to a very troubling extent, is desperate to fit in. He also seems to want play fair. He’s essentially a caricature of a 1950s Englishman who struggled to control more modern opponents on his own side.

Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman

I thought Hindu myths were out there but the Vikings are on another planet. Amazing. strong. Loopy in the best way possible.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, William Dalrymple

This is the book of the moment. I purchased it in print. Got 50 pages in, couldn’t find time to read it, so I stuck it on in the car. A detailed look at how a pretty unpromising enterprise came to rule a sub-continent ina very brutal fashion.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, Malcolm Gladwell

I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s a people manager. Do we really understand people when we talk to them? Too often we do not. This book has few answers but it makes you think and introduces some engaging ideas (I particularly love the “default to truth” concept). I dare you to listen to it and not think differently.

Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times on Television, Louis Theroux

Another memoir. Quite a fun one. It’s light. It’s interesting. If you liked his weird weekends, you’ll like this.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

I have to confess that I’m not a huge friend of Dickens. As a child I was forced, through a conspiracy between my mother and my English teacher, to read a Tale of Two Cities. Since then I’ve had a simmering resentment. The wound runs deep. However, people have been raving about the narration by Richard Armitage. Rightly so. It is excellent. I’ve not quite finished this one, but it is thoroughly enjoyable thus far. There are a couple of weeks left of the year so I’ve got a few hundred miles ahead of me. I’m confident I’ll get it finished by Christmas.

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