Business Insight Zone

We can get too smart for our own good. Too complicated.

At its worst, this tendency gets us hung up on the most trivial questions: “Which of the 100 new e-mails in my inbox should I handle first?” turns into a five-minute debate with yourself.* “Should the paint in the reception area be ‘eggshell’ or ‘French vanilla’?” turns into an hour-long meeting.†

Skip all that trivia — and winnow your stack of potential tasks / customers / projects / vendors / hires / etc. by applying the simplest possible tests:

• Does this enhance revenue directly — yes or no?
• If all our customers were like this, would they happily make us rich — yes or no?
• Will this project likely give us something useful — yes or no?
• Is this vendor easy to work with — yes or no?
• Does this conversation put me ahead or behind?
• Does this employee make us enough more than he or she costs us — yes or no?

Listen, if you have Hank Paulson’s thankless job, you’re going to have a lot of nuances to consider — and lots of constituencies to satisfy. If you’re building the Large Hadron Collider, ditto. I understand that hand surgery is quite complicated.

But many things in the business world are pretty elemental, if you’ll let them be. For these things, eliminate gray-area thinking and let ‘er rip.

The clarity can be breathtaking.

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* One good answer: Start with the oldest e-mail and handle each message only once.
† Correct answer: Let the decorator decide what color the paint should be. Don’t solicit opinions.