In the real world (that is, the non digital world), there have always been good managers, poor managers, and people who thought a lot about management – ever since people were managed.

Just about all of us could say what good management is.

As the person being managed, we are clear on the goals we are expected to work towards, we know where we are, we have a rough idea of what isn’t an acceptable way of getting there, and beyond that we have maximum freedom in how we get there.

So the manager needs to define the goal, outline the path, say what’s not allowed, and leave people to get on with it.

That means the manager trains his or herself to switch off the powerful human instincts to control too much, micromanage too much, worry and bother people too much. The bigger the stakes, the harder this is. Yet plenty of people have managed it.

Now look at the digital era. Most people use software tools all day long. If good management is translated into good software, that means we should have software which helps us understand where we are, what goals we need to achieve, and gives us maximum freedom how we get there.

Do any of us have this? Is anybody building this?

Most software seems to leave people feeling clueless about where they are and what is expected of them, whilst simultanously micromanaging them. Software can be pretty good at telling us what’s not allowed, but not in a very helpful way.

This blog is for people who are interested in software which can help people involved in managing something to better achieve their objectives.

Is this you?

Why are you interested in software?

Many people are interested in technology for technology’s sake. This sometimes seems to be the Google thinking. People who like technology being able to do something which it has never been able to do before.

Many people like social angles, like helping support democracy, or helping people learn, or manage some health issue – which are laudable aims even if software by itself doesn’t achieve much.

People in the business software arena are often interested in driving efficiencies and automating things. If it can be done cheaper and easier by a computer, let’s do it. Automation can put the computer in the heart of the company’s operation, managing supply chains,  transactions and data gathering.  Or perhaps they are interested in data entry and retrieval systems.

If someone is not managing anything, ie working on their own (like a graphic designer), they can probably easily find software which can do as much as software can.

But where the current software industry falls down is for people who need to manage something (where other people or companies are involved), including in security, policy, business management, financial management, assets, projects, customer service.

Many of the attempts to bring software into these sectors fail because people want to develop technology for technology’s sake, drive efficiencies, automate things or solve social problems.

It proves to be very hard to develop software which can help  people do things because it involves so much left brain + right brain together. Software people are usually good at left brain stuff – logic – but the people side of it can’t usually be solved by logic.

Even working out what someone’s specific objectives are involves a deep understanding of what they do, which is usually different to how you might think it is without asking them.

These points are important to stress because there is so much discussion right now about artificial intelligence and computers taking over people’s jobs. Computers are nowhere near being able to take over most people’s jobs, because the jobs involve understanding complex situations and computers can’t do that very well.

In the rare occasion where a job involves following specific steps then computers can do it. But that doesn’t apply in many cases, and normally it is the aspects of a job which don’t follow specific steps where you really need a computer – such as an airline check-in person facing an unusual request.

If you hear the phrase ‘internet of things’ – you’re probably listening to someone trying to sell you something. Why is this? Because anyone else – someone you might want to use the data from the ‘things’ – is never going to see the ‘things’ in this way.

Let’s say you are a ship engineer keeping track of your ship’s operations. You can install more sensors, yes. But you’ll only do this if they’ll tell you something you want to know. In which case you’ll probably think of it as the ‘sensor which tells you x’. The same could go for anyone monitoring any industrial facility.

In your house, OK yes you can wire your washing machine and fridge to the internet. You can connect your car to the internet. But unless you’re just doing it for fun, surely you would only do this if it helped you to achieve some purpose so the same logic would apply.

Other examples – farmers monitoring their farms with various sensors, electricity companies monitoring consumption in a more granular way. They are going to think about what they are trying to achieve, not their ‘internet of things’.

Yes, we know, it is getting easier to add sensors and connect them up. The point is what we do with them.

If by bank (HSBC) counts as a typical “traditional financial institution”, in my opinion it is exceptionally good at IT including cybersecurity, exceptionally good at customer service, offers all the services I need as a private individual and as a business, all for very low rates (last time I looked for a mortgage it was available for no fee at 1.79 per cent).

It has been unwilling to take much risk in terms of lending to my business, but then as a bank it is not in the business of taking high financial risk, and my business has been a pretty high financial risk for a while, being in the oil and gas industry.

So how does a fintech company compete with this?

Here’s a few ideas.

Many people find their bank not very ‘user-friendly’. My bank does create a few hoops – complex logins, difficulty setting up new bank accounts. Perhaps there’s room for improvement there.

HSBC has a weakness on some financial transfers – occasionally I’ve made transfers to India which have got stuck on the way, or blocked for security reasons, and no proactive contact from the bank to fix it, they basically wait until I call them. It probably isn’t HSBC’s fault, but there’s room for improvement possibly.

I probably score reasonably well on whatever HSBC’s scoring system is. The scoring system gets pretty vicious for people on the wrong side of it. Perhaps there are millions of people with low score but who could be good customers. Are there opportunities there?

Perhaps there could be better international services. Sometimes I receive and spend money in the same foreign currency, and if my company was bigger there would be more than that. Perhaps it could hold the money for me for a while in Euros or Dollars so I don’t lose twice on the exchange?

The money transfer costs are quite high – £17 to send £100 to the Netherlands for example

I don’t have much insight on when my customers will pay, except from employing someone to talk to people with overdue debts, which is expensive. Having that knowledge could be very valuable.

Bank reconciliations are a very manual process, employing someone to compare the bank statement line by line with the record in the accounts software. Perhaps this could be easier? (Although the bulk of this effort is keeping the accounts software up to date, which would need to be done manually anyway)

Perhaps all the various roles – accounting, debt collection, bank transfer management, cash flow prediction, could all be better integrated?

It is possible to imagine more sophisticated loan offerings – at the moment loans are basically only offered when the risk is zero, and impossible or silly rates otherwise.

Could there be a loan business for more high risk, but still low risk, loans, with some kind of compensation? For example loans guaranteed against future bookings, or loans which are deducted before any payments are made? Or loans for specific business sectors where the bank gets involved in the business’ future scenario modelling to get a better sense of the risk?

I have just read this BBC News article. The heading, “robots and drones take over classrooms”, and the opening illustration, showing a robot teacher, suggests that this is an article about robots taking away teachers’ jobs. The third paragraph talks about “a world where artificial intelligence and robots threaten jobs.”

But the article itself is about nothing of the sort.

The article is about a London school where students built a virtual reality Ethiopian village, the students programmed a robot to ski, and an Indiana school where students learned to program a drone. Then it talks about Microsoft building software for headsets for understanding the human body. There is a discussion about whether students should be learning this sort of stuff.

Of course it makes sense for students to learn as much about computers as they possibly can, or are inclined to. [Although based on personal experience, the idea that all young people would rather learn how to code than watch YouTube is not true].

But none of this is taking anyone’s job away, if anything the teachers are far more engaged doing this, and far more robotlike if they were reciting the same lessons year after year with no mental engagement at all (fairly common 20 years ago, based on personal experience).

So what’s going on. Is society just really keen to talk about robots taking over people’s jobs? Is this narrative driven by the sort of people who enjoy threating people’s livelihoods? Anyway, its a load of nonsense.

Software companies  – and websites – which give people complex ‘terms and conditions’ to read are not just being a little ignorant – they are insulting their customers.

Let’s go through what this is saying, as an imaginary conversation between me, the software company, and you, the customer.

You know and I know that you’re not going to read this.

But I can force you – or very strongly encourage you – to tick a box to say you’ve read it as a condition for going forward with my service because – that’s very easy to do with software.

I get some advantage from this over you (otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it).

So I’m basically happy to exploit your laziness / trust for my own benefit and give you nothing back. Although I take it we’re still friends, because this is what everybody else does, isn’t it?

Imagine the owner of your local public house doing something similar – I’ll serve you beer if you sign this long legal document – to illustrate how ridiculous it is. Yet somehow because we’re in the software realm we’re conditioned to accept it. Does that mean that software programs people to act like morons?

Do these terms have any legal weight? I don’t know, how can you sue someone for not reading something it is obvious they’d never read. But you can still go ahead and do everything you said you had the right to do, and its pretty hard for someone to stop you.

Far better – I would have thought – to scrap the lot of them unless they really add something and people really have a chance to consider them.

If you want to monitor your own health, here’s some useful factors.

How much are you sleeping and how well

What are you eating

Are you brushing your teeth

Are you getting any exercise

Are you spending time in dangerous environments

(If in China or India) are you spending lots of time in dirty air

Are you spending too much time indoors

You can sleep more, exercise more or differently, eat less or eat differently, have more time in clean air, get outside more

Surely the difference between unhealthy and superhealthy is pretty much all there.

What has Fitbit got to do with any of it?