The best business strategies are always simple: bringing business to its core customers, deepening relationships with them and providing them only the products they want. Companies win when they focus on simplicity.
Complexity is the other opposite of simplicity, and as surprising as it may sound most Managers tend to like complexity rather than use simplicity as a strategy: most tend to extend product lines, look for marginal customers, new projects, different marketing methods, etc.
Now, to be fair, in any large company, as in the world at large, most things are not naturally simple. You have to make them simple.
Therefore, not everything can be made simple, but you can concentrate on the few important things where simplicity is most likely to make you and your company successful. Target the problems that you suspect will have simple solutions (the feasible ones).
Simplicity is a combination of art with cost reduction - providing the most exciting product or service at the most affordable cost. Apple, for example, was so successful due to the concept of simplicity. Henry Ford did the same for cars, Eastman did it for photography.
Simplicity requires a deep understanding of a product’s core essence. At the hearth of simplicity lies accessibility.
The essence of simplification is grasping what is and what is not important in a complex picture – make it recognizable and easy to understand or use.
The mark of a great leader is someone who simplifies in such a way that his or her listeners grasp one powerful conclusion and then act on it.
In order to simplify a Manager has to:
- Focus
- Define the core essence of your business (product, customer, cost)
- Establish a simple goal at a time.
- Avoid distractions outside of the established goal
- Standardize
- Automatize
- Have people you can trust rather than processes to follow