Eight steps to keeping things simple
Focused staff can maintain clarity, thrive while pursuing your company’s goals
As you gear up for fall strategy meetings and budget planning, here’s a challenge for you: keep things simple. Complexity leads to confusion, competing priorities and loss of focus.
With simplicity, an organization sets just a few key goals and ensures every member of the team understands their role in accomplishing those objectives.
When problems arise, your people can maintain complete clarity by keeping those goals in mind. Everyone knows what to do when, and how their job performance strengthens the rest of the organization.
The problem is, our world grows more complicated every day. Markets change, the people you count on will come and go, and churning technologies chew up strategies like popcorn.
Yet entrepreneurs thrive in changing times; they are instinctive simplifiers, driven by singular, specific visions. (Think of Steve Jobs’s mission: to create a personal computer for creative people.) Sadly, focused entrepreneurs are usually outnumbered by followers who hum, haw and overcomplicate every worthwhile mission.
Who are these complicators? The accountants, planners, regulators and consensus-seekers who are trained to ask “Have we considered the cash flow/ tax/ environmental/ moral implications of this decision?”
Necessary as they often are, these “Yes, but” overthinkers will drag every worthwhile initiative into the mud unless leaders hold them accountable for moving things forward.
The good news is, small companies have the advantage when it comes to simplicity. Bigger organizations may have economies of scale, but they also have more layers, processes and protocols — and less accountability. Simplicity wins.
But simplicity is rarely simple. Figuring out the essence of a product, brand or organization takes hard work and applied brainpower. Communicating this essence takes creativity and consistency. And fending off distractions and complicators requires iron will. Which is why Jobs warned us all to “Say no to 1,000 things.”
How can you encourage simplicity in your business?
Push for production and logistics simplicity. Standardize products, inputs, processes, prices and discounts. Today’s automated systems mean you can finish most tasks in less time than it takes to ask whether your client wants it in blue or red; the fewer the choices, the faster things can go. In its early, most innovative days, McDonald’s served only burgers, drinks and fries. That limited customers’ expectations and made service faster than anyone else’s. (McDonald’s first mascot wasn’t Ronald, but a cartoon chef named Speedee.) For more examples, think of WestJet, which operated for 19 years with just one type of jet, the Boeing 737. Or Steam Whistle Brewing, with its one lager and the defining slogan, “Do one thing really, really well.”
Simplicity starts with strategy. Author and “growth guy” Verne Harnish, founder of the Entrepreneurs Organization, advises entrepreneurs to dump the 50-page business plan and answer two questions on a single sheet of paper:
“In a single measure (revenue, number of closings, active communities, revenue per employee, etc.), where do I want the business to be 10 years from now?”
“What is the most important thing this company must accomplish in the next 90 days?”
Some subtleties may get lost in the cracks this way, but your organization will be focused, fired up and ready to do great things.
Reduce the number of layers in your organization. Keep production employees focused on business goals and focus your leadership team on making things easier for staff at every level. When things go wrong or take too long, hold your managers to account.
Include all employees in the simplicity quest. You and your managers should always be asking your team, “How can I make your job easier/faster/better?” They know what works and what doesn’t, and they’re happy to tell you if you promise to listen.
Master the paperwork. Have formal job descriptions, identify the values and core competencies you require of employees, create operating manuals to ensure everyone knows what to do. If that sounds complicated, it’s just temporary. As in your kitchen or garage, creating systems takes longer at first, but they make things so much easier day to day.
Look into Lean, the lean-production philosophy that seeks to increase business productivity by focusing only on what the customer needs — not on what the company has always done. It targets all kinds of waste: sloppy inventories, wasted time, underused space, duplication of effort, failures of co-ordination. Most important, it creates a company-wide culture of continuous improvement.
Before you add any product, create a job or impose a new rule, analyze how this change will complicate or simplify.
Put strong people in charge of promoting simplicity and protecting it from harm. If it doesn’t become part of the culture, complexity will creep back in.