A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - Just a Few Words - Quotes on Simplicity

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” - Frederic Chopin

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein

“What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous.” - William Albert Allard

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

“I apologize for the length of this letter, but I didn't have time to make it shorter.” - Mark Twain

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

This week’s posts are on simplicity, something which doesn’t come easily to me, unfortunately. It’s a challenge to readily bridge the gap between thinking with complexity and expressing ideas simply. While doing that is easy for some, I’ve personally met very few individuals where that’s the case. So like many, I work very hard to make things simple and have adopted some approaches to help, including:

• Focusing on what matters from my personal core purpose and minimizing everything else.
• Forcing myself to pick between options in a situation and not trying to pursue them all.
• Not saying everything about a topic and focusing on what’s most relevant for the audience.
• Going through a “finished” post or presentation to eliminate 10-20% of the words or slides.
• Applying the rule of three and limiting lists to three major themes or categories whenever possible.

These are a start, and the remaining posts this week explore other aspects of simplicity: the result of all but eliminating a key resource, checking your strategy for clarity, and delegating your complex issues to get help from the most famous simple man of our generation. The week finishes with a few more quotes on the topic. And by Friday, ideally, we’ll all be able to meet on the other side of complexity, with a greater command of simplicity.

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - The Simplicity of Next to Nothing

In a Kansas City Star film contest, one entry was “The Bible…In 29 Seconds.” Pick a project and see what a 90+% reduction in one resource means. How pinpoint could your storytelling get?

The Third Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Giving the Okay to Challenge Thinking

Early in his tenure, our CEO shared his ten business principles. I don’t remember nine of them, but one stood out for of its simplicity, matter-of-factness, and wide applicability: “Don’t do anything stupid.”

I've used this admonition numerous times when attempting to slow (and ideally thwart) ill-founded ideas others felt really strongly about pursuing. When you can invoke the CEO's own words, it provides a lot more credibility in challenging dumb stuff and trying to do the right things for the business.

The approach's success oriented me toward the tremendous leadership benefits of sharing what really matters in easy-to-understand words. If you can get your message distilled in a simple, clear way, it frees up team members to use their own perspectives and innovative spirits in beneficial ways a leader could never anticipate. I've written several times about my own struggle for simplicity and have tried to take this learning to heart.

As an example, I was leading a motor sports program in what was then called the Busch Series. It's considered to be a second-tier series in NASCAR behind the "Cup" series, where everything costs 3 to 5 times more to sponsor. Our challenge was creating a program with a top tier Cup sponsorship's impact with a relatively small investment. This potential dilemma was at the heart of our internal program strategy: "We're doing a Cup level program with a Busch Series budget." With that direction, the team understood our constraints and was freed to be more creative and challenging in how we attacked our goals.

Think about what simple strategic guidelines you can share with your team to help them be more effective in carrying out the most important activities.

Note: This is one of a series of posts on life-changing gifts. - Mike Brown

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - Change Your Character – Forrest Gump – “Simple Is as Simple Does”

No matter what you think of the character, Forrest Gump’s approach to the simplicity of life found him at the center of most major events of the second half of the twentieth century. When striving to simplify some of your complex problems, it would be interesting to see what possibilities would emerge by applying his outlook. Try it, seeking three new ideas from each of these perspectives that Forrest Gump applies:

• Listening to his mother’s advice
• Not having a lot of expectations
• Being open to new experiences
• Seeing all people the same, without prejudice
• Not making demands on others
• Not being judgmental
• Finding the good in negative situations
• Maintaining a positive outlook
• Being loyal to his friends
• Following simple philosophical principles
• Doing the basics that make a significant impact
• Being good hearted and generous

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Surf's Up!

Here are three links that can benefit you in varying (and sometimes fun) ways when preparing marketing plans.

Guerrilla Marketing Plans

I haven’t “blogged” other conference presentations yet, although I typically write pages of notes and idea starters. One of the most valuable note packets was from a 2003 Transportation Marketing Communications Association presentation by Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing. He covered essential elements of a marketing plan and the number of times you need to get a message in front of potential customers to move them to be repeat buyers. Interestingly enough, surfing the web recently, I found this Spark Insight page with notes taken from the same speech Levinson was giving then. Not sure if he’s still covering this material, but it’s a great quick reference on guerrilla marketing.

Marketing Plan Simplicity

This link to Entrepreneur magazine content popped up on AOL recently. It’s a great reminder on the importance of simple prose, reasonable length, and a direct style when preparing a business plan. While its target audience is people writing business plans for their own start-ups, it’s certainly applicable for any marketing or business plan you’re putting together even within a big company.

Deceptive Simplicity - "Indexed"

I love a Venn diagram just as much as the next person. Okay, I love a Venn diagram more than most people. This book and website by Jessica Hagy capture her commentary on a wide range of topics through Venn diagrams, x-y charts, and other graphs. She produces an amazing amount of content on her blog and generates a lot of comments debating what the charts mean. Her ability to translate complex issues into a few lines and words on an index card is inspirational (and maddening – if you struggle mightily to express ideas simply!).

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - A Simple Strategy Check

Here’s a quick check for generating a simple, solid strategy. Is your strategy?

• Understandable – Will employees be able to read it and comprehend your direction, even if someone isn’t there to explain it?
  
• Implementable – Will something be able to be done with the strategy to create positive business results?
  
• Aligning – Will following the strategy create a natural inclination for employees to work in a cooperative fashion toward a common goal?

Solid (and simple) strategies should generate three “Yes” answers to these questions. So how does your strategy stack up? Ideally it displays the appropriate level of simplicity.

The Eighth Day of Gifts – Cyndi Brown - "White Space Sells"

My wife Cyndi was instrumental in the greatest gift anyone has ever given me – helping rekindle my faith.

Beyond that, she’s been the source of countless gifts in our nearly 25 years together. One gift that’s helped throughout my business career was something Cyndi said to me back in college based on her award-winning journalism, marketing, and PR experience: “White space sells.”

Although a deceptively simple phrase, it’s absolutely true. Ample white space helps:

• Set the stage to showcase and focus attention on the most important elements to communicate
  
• Remove unnecessary elements fighting for attention with whatever you’re advertising
  
• Make it easier on the viewer or reader to process and potentially better recall your primary message

Cyndi’s initial comment and its repetition have caused me to be attuned to not cluttering design elements with too much other stuff, although it's a challenge for someone who is a natural accumulator of all kinds of things. That’s why simplicity, writing fewer words, and ways to narrow options are such frequent topics: I’m trying to reinforce the importance of literal and figurative “white space” to myself.

I love white space, really - as long as it’s on a page! If it’s outside white space as in snow, well, that’s another story!

Strategy in Action - Suzy and Jack Welch & Fast Company Links

Two recent articles do a great job of addressing the real world benefits of having a strategic foundation in business.

In a recent Business Week column, Suzy and Jack Welch provide a brief rationale for the value of mission statements and then cover several steps toward developing a meaningful one that actually drives business decisions.

A longer piece in Fast Company issue 121 by Charles Fishman called “To the Moon in a Minivan” reports on NASA’s approach to develop, along with Lockheed Martin, the replacement spacecraft for the space shuttle. What makes it particularly interesting is the treatment of the strategic elements within NASA’s plan, providing a behind the scenes look at how a major enterprise applies strategic concepts to move an effort ahead.

We learn NASA’s "vision" statement (“To the moon, Mars, and beyond”) and how its effort is bounded by direct critical success factors such as keeping the spacecraft’s weight under 50,250 pounds, focusing on simplicity & utility, and exploiting pre-existing technology (even going as far back as the Apollo program) before inventing new solutions. Importantly, the program has a simple and very visual statement to align its development efforts. According to Ship Hatfield, the NASA project manager for the capsule, the Orion spacecraft is “more like a mini-van. It’s more of a vehicle to go to the grocery store in.” With a picture like this for a project team, making strategic decisions becomes much easier.