Simplify, simplify.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand . . . Simplify, simplify.
Thoreau won’t be displacing Peter Drucker at the top of the management-wisdom heap anytime soon, but on this one thing they certainly agreed: you need to get things simpler if you want to do them better.
Drucker held that top executives could handle one or maybe two major initiatives at a time. Anything more and something was sure to get lost in the shuffle. Thoreau believed that the trappings of America’s increasingly mechanized life — way back in the mid-19th century, mind you — were crowding out human interactions, with each other and with the realm of nature.
Every day I hear from dozens of people who lament the complexity of their lives — at work, at home, and especially in the mixture of the two. Special anger wells up at company policies, cultures, and individuals who gum up the works with needless complexity.
Mind you, some complexity is necessary: you don’t build an MRI machine or an airport terminal using 3rd-grade-level math. But how many of your tasks — your team’s projects — your company’s larger endeavors — would benefit from a hard dose of simplification?
So, tell me:
What should YOU make simpler for yourself?
What should your ORGANIZATION make simpler for everyone?
~
Category: Management, The working life3 Comments so far
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As you’re well aware, I’ve been working to simplify my online/computer life all week, and it’s been quite the challenge for me. There are all these technology “tools” we can use that are supposed to make life more simple, but sometimes they have the opposite effect.
Having said that, I think my organization could benefit from leveraging technology to simplify some of our processes. We already do a lot of it, but some things are still much more complex than need be. The greatest obstacle to simplification is that it requires CHANGE and breaking habits. Never easy things to do.
Thanks as always for your encouragement and wise words
Despite Toyota’s remarkable success, the company is notoriously slow to adopt new technology. They’re convinced that adding layers of new software, hardware, and other machines to solve a problem or improve efficiency just doesn’t work. In their view, automating a broken process just makes for a faster broken process. Far better to fix the process first, and then, if necessary, invest in new technology.
On a personal level, you can invest in new “efficiency” software (Omnifocus, GTD add-ons, the latest version of Outlook, etc.), but if your system for managing the flow of work is broken, the technology won’t make any difference. First fix the process; then find technology that makes life easier.
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