in a narrow skill, such as corporate finance or marketing. Moreover, although I knew a lot of arcane things about business, I knew nothing that was particularly useful. So imagine my relief when I met the recruiters at BCG, who said that they were looking for young and frankly wet-behind-the-ears people like me, because they could train us using their model of business success, which involved categorizing a client’s business as a star, a cash cow, a question mark or a dog, and then telling them what to do with it. I didn’t need to know anything myself; I just had to learn how to do that kind of analysis.
Apart from relief, though, what struck me was what a really peculiar business BCG itself was. Here it was, charging some of the top companies in America and around the world a fortune for advice that could be mass produced by a handful of smart but totally inexperienced, newly minted MBAs. I came to discover that the work was very valuable to companies as they could sell or close firms with little potential, while concentrating on the few really good businesses that they had — the star businesses. Yet, what impressed me the most was how BCG could grow like billy-o and also generate extremely high margins because its own “costs of production” were so low. The simple principles behind the Boston Box made it possible for BCG to train almost unemployable people like me and then trust us to turn out original and useful analysis in a very short period of time.
How could BCG do this? Because it simplified. It boiled down the libraries of worthy work on business strategy into one dinky little model that could be replicated for any business at relatively low cost, but which could be sold at a very high price, because it had great benefits for the customers — the large industrial corporations that were BCG’s market.
What were the benefits from the customer’s viewpoint? The Boston Box was something that was so simple that it could be grasped by everyone throughout an organization, and so useful that it told all the firm’s managers exactly what to do. It was easy to use, highly practical, elegant, and memorable. It could be used as a simplifying and unifying communication device throughout the client organization.
Is your business a star? Get your Star Principle score in sixty seconds at www.simplify.fm.
That set me thinking that perhaps the most successful companies were ones that were not only the market leaders in a high-growth market (the Star Principle), but also the most simple. In hard economic terms, simplifying has two great benefits:
it can lead to high growth in a business and market; and
it can do so at high margins, because simplifying can lead to low costs of production and high prices at the same time.
What a neat trick to pull!
Throughout my career, I had always been on the lookout for simple answers, but I had never applied the principle template to simplifying in the same systematic way as I had with the 80/20 and Star principles. Then, about five years ago, Greg pointed out this gap in my thinking. That was how we started the journey that culminated in the book you are holding in your hands.
The Secret Red Thread
Greg and I came to the conclusion that simplifying should lead to extraordinary success. But there was a big surprise in store for us. We decided that the best way to illustrate simplifying — and to identify how to simplify — would be to explore case studies of the most successful simplifiers of the past hundred years or so. This was easier than we expected. There were plenty of great case studies available to us, from both the distant and the very recent past.
Then the truth dawned on us — the real secret of simplifying: Nearly all of the great success stories of the twentieth century — right up to the present day — are stories of simplifying.
We discovered that simplifying not only should lead to great economic success — as the theories of strategy and economics suggest. By observing men and women who have changed not only the face of business but how we work and live, we also learned that clever and creative simplifying has and continues to do just that. It really does lead to extraordinary success, and it has a huge impact on society to boot.
If you make a list of the people who have been most successful in the last hundred years — or, if you prefer, the last fifty, twenty, ten or even five years — a large majority of them have been great simplifiers:
Henry Ford;
Allen Lane;
the McDonald Brothers and Ray Kroc;
Walt Disney;
Ingvar Kamprad;
Kihachiro Kawashima;
Bruce Henderson;
F. Kenneth Iverson;
Herb Kelleher;
Steve Jobs and Jony Ive;
Akio Morita;
Bill Bain;
James Dyson;
Mitt Romney;
Jeff Bezos;
Pierre Omidyar;
Larry Page and Sergey Brin;
Daniel Ek;
Joe Gebbia; and
Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp.
The list goes on and on, and it continues to grow as new “unicorns” (private companies valued at more than a billion dollars) emerge every month.
All of these entrepreneurs simplified. Some of them were quite upfront about it. For instance, Henry Ford said of his revolutionary new car, the Model T, that
“… its most important feature was its simplicity . . . I thought it was up to me as the designer to make the car so completely simple that no one could fail to understand it. That works both ways and applies to everything. The less complex an article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and therefore the greater number may be sold.”1
Ray Kroc wrote that the McDonald brothers had created
“… a radically different kind of operation, a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu, the prototype for legions of fast-food units that would later spread across the land . . . Of course, the simplicity of the procedure allowed the McDonalds to concentrate on quality in every step, and that was the trick. When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull.”2
His first motto for McDonald’s, he said, “was KISS, which meant, Keep it simple, stupid.”
Steve Jobs described his whole approach as “very simple . . . the way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”3 His biographer, Walter Isaacson, wrote that Jobs “made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options. He attributed his love of simplicity to his Zen training.”4 Jony Ive, the creator of every Apple device from the iPod onwards, constantly
