“Simplification gets rid of meaningless things to create space for more meaningful things to happen.”
—Lisa Bodell
In a world where we’re promoted to the corner office based on the amount of work we do, not it’s quality, where everything is measured and re-measured then measured again, and where there never seems to be enough time in a day, the only solution is to simplify.
The corporate world has built skyscrapers towering over each other, always adding on to block out the other’s light. With all this rapid growth, procedures are put in place to protect the owners, the executives, the employees, the clients. They’re spackled together quickly to keep up with the liabilities that are multiplying even quicker.
Growth breeds complexity, but companies that cut through the mummifying red tape and simplify their businesses are the ones that stay alive and thrive.
Keynote speaker Lisa Bodell, author of Why Simple Wins and founder/CEO of futurethink, says the first step is identifying areas that can be simplified. The average company measures six times more metrics than in 1950. The typical American in a corporate setting spends about 45 percent of their workweek in meetings, 23 percent dealing with emails, 18 percent on unproductive work and only 14 percent on real, valuable work.
Companies that survive make work simpler for their employees and transactions easier for their customers, like Dropbox and Netflix.
Dropbox cuts down the chaos
To simplify, DropBox staged an “Armeetingeddon.” They canceled all meetings for two weeks and gave their employees the freedom and time to examine their usual schedules and eliminate meetings that didn’t serve them. Dropbox leadership urged their executives to respect this hiatus and their employees to protect their time.
After the calendar cleansing, DropBox employees feel their time is valued greater by leadership, building trust within the company. This paradigm shift even influenced the structure of the company.
While DropBox headquarters’ employees have more than tripled, the amount of conference rooms hasn’t even doubled. Most importantly, employee retention is up because people feel they are doing work that matters.
Robert Sutton, organizational change expert and author of Scaling Up Excellence, says that organizations change as they grow. Weekly meetings that may have been imperative five years ago are now obsolete time-suckers that breed resentment within your company.
Netflix simplifies to innovate
MoviePass CEO and business speaker Mitch Lowe says his success with Netflix came from simplifying based on customer concerns. Similar to how DropBox responded to employees’ complaints on the back end, Lowe responded to complaints from customers. He approached the movie industry from the consumer side and adapted it to fit the customers’ desire for a simpler way to view movies.
Netflix addressed two complaints their main competitor, Blockbuster, ignored: the hassle of in-store rentals and late fees. Netflix decided to ship their movies directly to their customers and eliminated late fee penalties by giving the viewer an indefinite rental period.
By simplifying the entire movie rental process, Netflix was not only able to keep their consumers happy, but also reinvent the industry, simplifying along the way to bring us the modern-day, Netflix movie streaming experience.
Whether you are dealing with complex growth or entering into an overly complex industry, the best plan of action for is to simplify. There is always a way to create efficiency in your company. The trick is finding it.
