“Is It Painful To Get The Simplest Task Done?”

Ask yourself this about where you work, and then think about the value of simplicity in an organization.

Since this post is going to be about the power of simplicity in business, I’ll keep it relatively short. Simplicity, you know? (P.S. I’ve written about this before, i.e. here and here.)

I think it’s probably helpful to level-set at the beginning.

The flawed assumptions we all make

In part because we see a lot of young guys making money off tech, we tend to think this is a very “entrepreneurial” or “innovative” time. It’s not. Companies are more bureaucratic than ever. Why would that be? If the goal of a company is often to cut cost, why would they take on all those salaries in the form of “Strategic Account Manager Level II?”

Very simple. Bureaucracy allows people to make a good salary and never have to make decisions. All they do all week is go from meeting to meeting and fire off low-context emails. Every two weeks, they get a nice chunk of change in the Bank of America account. They essentially did nothing except digitally push papers around and say the same 12 buzzwords in various meetings. Bureaucracy and hierarchy enable this to happen.