Yesterday I commented on the ZDnet article What CEOs really want — and how IT can provide it, by Joe McKendrick, and jumped beyond the context of the article for a more literal meaning of “CEOs Want Customer Intimacy.” Today I stay within the confines of their context, but also get more personal.
IBM did a study of “standout” CEOs and found they were 30% more likely to focus on simplification than the non-standouts. That’s quite a bit. But it makes sense considering that CEOs must deal with layers of management, conflicting analyses, red tape, multiple vendors bidding for their business, competing divisions, marketing wanting an extra widget on the doohickey “because it would look cool” but makes it harder to use, and the other 10,000 issues of complexity.
I left blatant clues above that CEOs aren’t the only ones who need to think simply. The following quote sums it up nicely:
This sense of simplification needs to be deeply embedded within the corporate culture, not a special program, the survey report adds.
This is very important to remember. An organization that does not focus on simplifying, whether it be the user interface of a product or how to reach a customer, will likely develop a bloat culture. When they talk of simplifying, they are not discussing a process or a decision or a product, but EVERYTHING.
I found that quite an eye opener. Simplifying leads to faster decisions, more accountability, a clearer command structure, elegantly useful products, and any number of things I haven’t thought of.
Although I blog with added words and sentence fragments, these are conscious decisions to bring “me” into these posts. But even here, some posts were revised…I’m not even sure how many times. (I confess, it’s easy to tell which posts didn’t receive that level of treatment…) My formal material gets put through the wringer before we publish it.
Remember though, things can be oversimplified. You can inadvertently strip nuance and subtlety from what is otherwise a bull in a china shop. There is an art to simplification.
It’s a discipline, and it’s up to the CEO to enforce that discipline. Milton is a study in this. When considering nearly any topic, we are reminded to simplify. In fact, we often debate here about whether something is “simple.”
This is a great thing, because these discussions are more about HOW to simplify something than WHETHER to simplify something. Do you have that where you are?
