Appealing
Are Free Services Price- or Proposition-Simplifying?
Conclusion
Key Points
10 How to Price-Simplify Part I: Product Redesign
How to Spark a Price Revolution
Redesign the Product
11 How to Price-Simplify Part II: Business System Redesign and Scale Up
Redesign the Business System to Transform Your Industry
Scale Up
Conclusion
Key Points for Chapters 10 and 11
PART THREE: SAVE THE DINOSAURS?
12 Do They Need Saving?
Warning Signals Test
Key Points
13 The Weakness of Strong Firms: Five Bad Reasons Why Managers Don’t Simplify
The Overhead Trap
The Cannibalization Trap
The Customer Trap
The Complexity Trap
The Skills Trap
Key Points
14 How Market Leaders Can Simplify Without Tears
Countering Price-Simplifying
Countering Proposition-Simplifying
Counter Price- and Proposition-Simplifying
Is the Penny Dropping About Acquiring Proposition-Simplifiers?
Key Points
PART FOUR: THE REWARDS OF SIMPLIFYING
15 Does Price-Simplifying Pay?
Ford
McDonald’s
Southwest Airlines
IKEA
Charles Schwab
Honda
16 Does Proposition-Simplifying Pay?
Amazon
Apple (the iPod Years)
ARM
Tetra Pak
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
17 The Success of Simplifying: An Archaeological Dig
How Do the Companies Fare in Terms of Increasing Their Market Value?
How Do the Companies Fare in Terms of Annual Increase in Value?
How Do the Companies Fare in Terms of Outperformance of Their Rivals?
Industry-Wide Simplifying
Conclusions
18 The Limitations, Power, and Glory of Simplifying
Are There Any Viable Non-Simplifying Strategies?
Simplifying in the Big Picture
The Next Steps for Entrepreneurs
Next Steps for Corporate CEOs
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
PERRY MARSHALL
This is not just a “great” book. Nor is it merely an important book, or a “good read.” SIMPLIFY is one of the ten most valuable business books you will read in your lifetime. I charged $7000 a head for a three day seminar with Richard in Chicago. The event culminated in five hours of Richard delivering his SIMPLIFY material. This audience included entrepreneurs with $10 million+ businesses, with potential to reach into the billions. They were ecstatic.
SIMPLIFY is a shortcut to the exact business that will game-change any industry. Business people and investors talk about “unicorns,” “disruptive business models,” and all the rest. Those superstars are hard to predict, but we know them when we see them — usually after the big money has already been made. This book leaps you past years of meandering to the exact product or service that will tip the playing field solidly in your favor. If you pull this off, your competitors will find it impossible to follow you. And you will make life-changing money.
The real title of this book could very well be, SIMPLIFY: If you don’t, they will. That’s because it is inevitable that sooner or later, someone will come along and revolutionize your industry. It will typically be an outsider — like Larry Page and Sergey Brin upsetting the search engine industry with Google. The good ol’ boys club rarely sees the outsiders coming until it’s too late.
It will happen. The question is, who is going to do it? It can be you. Even if you’re insider. If you know the formula.
This is not just a book to read and enjoy. (Though it is a very enjoyable read.) This is a book to memorize, to internalize, whose ideas should permeate your thinking, your planning, and the language you share with your investors and key team members.
Richard worked harder on this book than any other. It was a massive undertaking. Simplification always is.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” What he means by this is, our initial conceptions of a product or a project are often clear and simple … then in the middle of the project things get almost hopelessly complex. Most people never get out of the woods.
But on rare occasions, a visionary like Steve Jobs has a clear vision for achieving simplicity and elegance and doggedly pursues this to the end. That vision is what Richard defines in this book. We’ve heard all the stories about Jobs’ obsession with simplicity, but here Richard lays it all out in a succinct formula that mere mortals can achieve. He has embodied simplicity even in his teaching of it.
Richard sent me several drafts and we spent months discussing it. His final product is genius. I don’t know if it will outsell his famous book The 80/20 Principle; it may not, as this material is highly advanced.
But it doesn’t matter. Because this is Richard Koch’s Magnum Opus.
