By Hiran de Silva
I have finally got around to explaining something about myself that I probably should have explained a long time ago.
It may explain why I sometimes get into trouble.
It may explain why some of my comments on LinkedIn are interpreted as confrontational when, from where I am sitting, I am simply asking a question.
And it certainly explains a great deal about the way I have approached my working life.
I have always had a particular relationship with truth.
Not truth in some grand philosophical sense. I mean something much more practical.
What is actually happening?
What are the facts?
Does what we are saying correspond with reality?
And, perhaps most importantly:
Who benefits from knowing the truth — and who benefits from the untruth?
It took me many years to understand how important that last question is.
Liverpool and Liverpool Street
I often use an absurd example to illustrate the point.
Imagine a tour operator selling a Beatles tour of England.
The highlight of the final afternoon is Liverpool: the childhood homes, the schools, Strawberry Field, the Casbah, the Cavern Club and the places where the Beatles story actually happened.
There is only one problem.
The tour operator takes its customers to Liverpool Street.
Liverpool Street is in London.
Liverpool is nearly 180 miles away.
Now imagine that the customers don’t know the difference. They have come from overseas. They are shown some buildings, given some stories, have a wonderful afternoon and return home delighted.
They give the tour five stars.
The tour becomes enormously popular.
Thousands of satisfied customers recommend it.
Now I come along and ask:
“How do you get your customers from central London to Liverpool in twenty minutes?”
That is not an accusation.
It is a question.
But it is a very dangerous question.
Because once we establish that Liverpool and Liverpool Street are different places, the economics change.
Getting people to the real Liverpool takes time. It costs money. The itinerary has to change. Perhaps the entire tour has to change.
Suddenly, the truth has a cost.
And the untruth has value.
Not to the customer, necessarily. But certainly to the tour operator.
That distinction has fascinated me throughout my career.
My First Encounter With the Cost of Truth
I trained as a chartered accountant in London.
The firm in which I trained eventually became part of Deloitte, and its standards of training were high. We were taught not merely what to do, but why we were doing it.
After completing my training contract, I moved to a smaller firm.
One of my assignments involved work relating to Solicitors’ Accounts Rules.
I discovered that the firm’s established audit procedure was not what I understood the regulatory requirement to be.
Where I believed we were required to check 100 percent of something, the firm was checking 10 percent.
So I instructed the staff working for me to check 100 percent.
They thought I was mad.
Eventually the matter went upwards.
Why was I telling people to do ten times as much work as they normally did?
My answer was simple.
Because that was what the rules required.
The response was effectively that I had come from a large firm and this was a small firm. Small firms did things differently.
But that did not answer my question.
The regulator made the rules. We didn’t.
Whether we were a large firm or a small firm didn’t change the requirement.
I didn’t last very long there.
At the time, I thought the issue was simply one of right and wrong.
Only later did I understand the economics.
Suppose I was right.
What then?
The firm would have to undertake substantially more work.
It might have to charge more.
It might become uncompetitive.
It would have to explain why the procedures it had followed in previous years had been inadequate.
It would have to explain the same thing to its staff.
The truth was not merely inconvenient.
The truth threatened the economics of the existing business model.
Suddenly, the reaction to me made much more sense.
Sometimes an Untruth Has Commercial Value
Years later, I heard another story that reinforced the lesson.
A businessman I knew told me about his first encounter with someone who subsequently became my boss.
My future boss had been examining the books and discovered an irregularity.
The businessman telling me the story was responsible for the area concerned. If the matter were pursued, he might have had some explaining to do.
My future boss pointed out the anomaly.
Then he suggested they go to lunch.
The irregularity was never mentioned again.
But, as the businessman explained it to me many years later, they both knew what had happened.
And they both knew that something had been created by it.
Leverage.
That taught me something else.
Knowledge of the truth has value.
But sometimes not revealing the truth also has value.
Which brings me to the experience that changed my career.
When Truth Suddenly Became Valuable
After leaving the accounting profession, I eventually joined a publishing company.
One of its magazines was International Musician and Recording World, which I already read. Shortly before joining, I had bought an issue featuring Paul McCartney on the cover.
I was not recruited to run finance.
I was recruited as number two.
Then, on my first day, the man who recruited me was fired.
On my second day, Richard Desmond told me that I was now acting head of finance.
There was a slight problem.
I had never worked in an industry finance department before.
There was another, rather larger, problem.
Richard had not received proper management accounts for around six months.
The explanation he had repeatedly been given was that the company did not have the systems necessary to produce the information.
We needed a proper system.
Until we bought one, the required analysis simply wasn’t possible.
I got on with the job.
A couple of months later I happened to have a management report with me when I went into Richard’s office.
He saw it.
He hadn’t seen anything like it before.
He looked through it and asked which system company had produced it.
I smiled.
He noticed the smile.
I told him:
“It’s the system you’ve already got.”
That changed everything.
The problem had not been that the company lacked the technology.
The problem was that nobody had configured and used the existing technology to produce the information the business needed.
Richard did not need to spend a large amount of capital replacing something that could already do the job.
And here was the fascinating difference.
At the accountancy firm, establishing the truth had threatened the people paying me.
With Richard, establishing the truth benefited the person paying me.
His reaction was therefore completely different.
He promoted me.
He doubled my salary.
He gave me a company car.
And, much more importantly, I established a relationship with him in which he knew I would tell him what I actually thought.
The truth had acquired economic value.
That Was the Lesson
Those two experiences have stayed with me throughout my career.
They taught me that it is naïve simply to divide the world into people who tell the truth and people who don’t.
There is another dimension.
Follow the incentives.
Who benefits if something is true?
Who benefits if it is false?
Who benefits if nobody asks the awkward question?
Who pays the cost when an accepted belief turns out to be wrong?
And who gains when somebody exposes it?
That distinction becomes enormously important in business.
Which Brings Me to Excel
This is why I sometimes find social media frustrating.
I see claims about Excel, databases, AI, ERP systems, planning systems and the so-called Excel replacement industry.
Some of those claims may be perfectly correct.
Some may not.
But I am less interested in whether a claim is popular than in whether it survives contact with a real business problem.
Popularity is not evidence.
Followers are not evidence.
Likes are not evidence.
Five-star reviews are not evidence that Liverpool Street has somehow moved 180 miles north-west and become Liverpool.
So I ask questions.
If someone says:
“Excel is becoming a database.”
I don’t necessarily respond:
“That’s nonsense.”
I ask:
What is the value of a database to Excel?
Because until we answer that question, how can we possibly decide whether making Excel “more like a database” provides the same value?
What capability are we trying to reproduce?
What business problem was the database solving?
Does the proposed alternative solve the same problem?
For whom?
At what scale?
At what cost?
Those questions can be uncomfortable.
Recently, asking questions of that kind resulted in my being blocked.
Apparently, I was being persistently annoying.
Perhaps I was.
But I recognise the situation.
I have been here before.
The Layers of Truth
There is another complication.
Truth can have layers.
A child believes in Father Christmas.
At a particular stage of life, that is their truth.
Later they discover another truth.
Then, amusingly, they may participate in maintaining the earlier truth for younger brothers and sisters.
Knowledge works like this in many fields.
Excel certainly does.
At one level of knowledge, something appears absolutely true.
Move upwards one level and you discover that what you previously believed was only true within a limited context.
Move upwards again and the picture changes again.
That is not a problem.
That is learning.
The problem begins when somebody has a commercial, professional or reputational interest in preventing people from moving to the next level.
Then yesterday’s incomplete truth can become today’s profitable untruth.
Who Is Paying?
This leads to what may be the most important lesson of my career.
In a business there are different levels of interest.
At one level, somebody may benefit from teaching a fashionable technique.
Someone else may benefit from selling a particular product.
Someone may benefit from engagement on social media.
A software company may benefit from persuading people that a particular problem requires its software.
A consultant may benefit from complexity.
A training company may benefit from teaching whatever people currently want to learn.
None of those incentives is inherently wrong.
But they are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the person at the top of the organisation who ultimately pays the bill.
That person may care about something very different.
How much will it cost?
How quickly can we implement it?
Does it solve the problem?
Will it still work in five years?
Can my people maintain it?
Does it require another large capital investment?
Are we replacing something that already works?
What is the business outcome?
Those were the questions that mattered to Richard Desmond.
And answering those questions correctly changed my career.
So Let’s Test It
This has led me to an idea.
Instead of continuing endless arguments about technologies, products and techniques, I want to conduct an experiment.
Take a recognisable business problem.
One problem.
The same requirements.
The same starting point.
Then invite advocates of the different approaches to solve it.
Excel.
Power Query.
AI.
ERP.
Enterprise planning platforms.
Traditional IT development.
Relational databases.
Excel replacement products.
Whatever people believe represents the best answer.
But there is one crucial condition.
The advocates don’t get to decide who won.
Neither do I.
Let the customers decide.
Put the resulting approaches in front of finance directors, CFOs, managing directors and business owners.
Let them evaluate the outcomes.
Cost.
Time.
Flexibility.
Maintainability.
Scalability.
Capital requirement.
Business risk.
And, above all:
Does it actually solve the problem?
That changes the debate completely.
It stops being:
Which technology do you like?
It becomes:
Which outcome would you buy?
The Value of Truth
Looking back, I can see a thread running through my entire working life.
At that small accountancy firm, the truth had a cost to the people employing me.
I lost.
With Richard Desmond, the truth had enormous value to the person employing me.
I won.
That experience taught me something I have carried through the rest of my career.
When I encounter a claim, I don’t merely ask:
Is it true?
I ask:
Who benefits if people believe it?
And then I ask the question that matters even more:
Who pays if it isn’t true?
Because truth and untruth are not economically neutral.
Sometimes the truth protects a business.
Sometimes an untruth protects a business model.
And those are two very different things.
Perhaps that is why I keep asking awkward questions.
I am not particularly interested in winning arguments.
I want to know whether we are going to Liverpool.
Or Liverpool Street.
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