Download PDF Simple Rules How to Thrive in a Complex World Donald Sull Kathleen M Eisenhardt 9780544705203 Books

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Product details Paperback 288 pages Publisher Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 19, 2016) Language English ISBN-10 0544705203

Simple Rules How to Thrive in a Complex World Donald Sull Kathleen M Eisenhardt 9780544705203 Books Reviews

• The book is Highly Recommended. It is not the easiest book to read compared to popular business pulp fiction. This book is full of good insight, practical advice, and ideas that you can start to apply tomorrow. This is the best business book I have read in the last six months and one I will refer to for a long time.
  
  While the world is complex, simple rules describe the world in an actionable and valuable way. That is the central premise of Sull and Eisenhardt’s book. This book is a guidebook to understanding, creating, deploying, and enhancing simple rules. The authors provide a comprehensive exploration and examination of the idea of simple rules applied across nature, personal lives, society, and business.
  
  The authors treat the reader as an adult. This is not pulp business fiction that we see where one person is selling their wares based on a single story. The ideas in the book are simple, but their explanation in the book is rather dense. You have to read this book, rather than skim it; the discussion found in the book rewards the reader for their efforts.
  
  The book contains the simple rules for creating and applying simple rules. There are three ‘rules for rules’
  
  1. Figure out what will move the needle
  2. Choose a bottleneck, a constraint that is holding you back
  3. Craft the rules
  
  There are two basic groups of rules. Rules for making better decisions include
  
  > Boundary rules – help decide between two mutually exclusive alternatives
  > Prioritization rules – provide the basis for ranking alternatives and assigning
  > Stopping rules – when do we reverse a decision or take a different course
  
  Rules for doing things better include
  
  > How to rules – guide the basics of executing tasks
  > Coordination rules – getting things done when there are multiple actors
  > Timing rules – guidelines for when to take action
  
  Each set of rules is the focus of its own chapter in the book.
  
  Reading Simple Rules takes some persistence and focus but it is well worth the effort. The book’s density comes from a rare combination of the author’s desire to tell compelling stories and their academic background which calls for telling complete stories. It is a cross between the story telling style of a Malcolm Gladwell and the thoughtful prose and thinking of a Peter Drucker.
  
  Strengths
  
  The idea behind simple rules and their application is elegant, actionable, and particularly helpful in the face of demands to be more agile and flexible.
  
  The book contains multiple examples of simple rules developed by others and the context in which those rules work. This is critical to help the reader understand where the rules come from, why they are the way they are and how that can apply to you.
  
  The book goes into the processes, approaches, and questions involved in creating simple rules. Across multiple instances, Sull and Eisenhardt share the behind the scenes thinking people went through to create rules.
  
  The chapter on Simple Rules as strategy is terrific and should be required reading for any business executive.
  
  The examples are rather long, but it is invaluable in building the understanding to apply these rules. It is a part other authors leave out, making their ideas seem more platitudes than practices. This book contains practices.
  
  The case stories cross a wide range of situations from butterflies, honeybees to religious orders and up, and coming companies. The sheer breadth of stories illustrates that the ideas are real and readily applicable to multiple situations.
  
  Chapters on applying simple rules to your personal life are illustrative and helpful. These chapters demonstrate the broad applicability of the idea as well as the context behind different situations where rules apply. These are not self-help chapters filled with assertions; rather they are the information needed for reflection to help you in a meaningful way.
  
  Challenges
  
  The case stories are sometimes long on explanation which makes the book feel like a heavy read, particularly if you are used to skimming a business book for ideas. In this case, take the time to read as the depth of explanation often includes the micro-insights needed for execution.
  
  Not every case story is business related. This may frustrate people as they wonder how the history of the Jesuits, California landscaping or strength training matter. However, they do not only to illustrate the examples but also to demonstrate the power of simple rules.
  
  The prose is occasionally self referential, which is something rare in business books. While personal experience is helpful, it often adds words and weight to the book that is unnecessary given the other strong stories supporting these ideas.
  
  OVERALL
  
  Highly recommended and a book I will return to time and time again. Particularly helpful when you are stuck and the things that worked are not working. Chances are the rules need to change.
• I’ve been a fan of simple rules for years. Sometimes we called them “simple rules” and sometimes we called them “guidelines.” Sometimes they were “rules of thumb” and at other times they were “heuristics.” But I know how powerful and useful they can be. And, several years ago, I read Kathleen Eisenhardt’s book Competing on The Edge, which I thought was remarkably insightful and helpful.
  
  Put those two things together and you can guess that I was excited about reading Simple Rules How to Thrive in a Complex World by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull. I found a lot to like, but I was also disappointed. This is a good book that could have been a great book.
  
  Here’s the author’s definition of simple rules.
  
  “Simple rules are shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information. The rules aren’t universal – they’re tailored to the particular situation and the person using them.”
  
  That’s a good definition, and the first part of the book covers the basics of simple rules. After the introduction, there’s a chapter on why simple rules work and when you use them.
  
  You want to use simple rules for repetitive judgement calls. They should be tailored to a specific activity, especially when you must make a decision on the fly. They should be usable by a specific group of people. There are two other specific things about using simple rules that you should know.
  
  Simple rules are guidelines, not recipes. They don’t tell you what to do. Instead, they tell you how to decide what to do quickly. Simple rules are also the most powerful when they’re applied to important things. You can certainly use them for less important things, but importance and power go hand in hand.
  
  We live in a world where things seem to become more complex by the day. The temptation is to meet complexity with complexity. That’s what legislators try to do when they crank out laws that run to thousands of pages to try to deal with a complex marketplace or a complex regulatory challenge. Those thousand-page laws generate thousands of regulations. Even with all that effort and applied brainpower, I can’t think of a single situation where it’s worked.
  
  Simple rules give us a way to fight complexity with simplicity. That’s one of the big takeaways from this book.
  
  The chapter on Making Better Decisions introduces us to three kinds of rules. There are boundary rules that tell us where to do things and where not to do them. Prioritizing rules help us decide what to do first. And stopping rules help us know or decide when it’s time to quit and move on.
  
  Up to this point, Simple Rules is solid, helpful, and lean. There’s a lot of value. That changes when we move into the chapter on Doing Things Better. There, we’re introduced to two more kinds of rules coordination rules and timing rules. I’m sure they can be helpful, but I never got the point. I could have skipped this chapter.
  
  The chapter on Where Simple Rules Come From is interesting, but not necessary. You can pick up some common-sense tips, like the fact that people are more likely to follow rules they help develop, but you might be able to skip this chapter entirely, too.
  
  I expected the chapter on strategy and simple rules to be really helpful. Several writers, such as Erika Andersen, have approached strategy with just this idea in mind. If the people on the front line don’t have simple rules to follow, they’re not likely to do what you want, especially under pressure. Alas, this is where the book starts to wander off into the weeds. We’re told “When it comes to deciding where to apply simple rules, the most obvious activity is not always the right answer.” That’s certainly true, but it would have been better if the authors had given us clear and full advice on how to decide what is the right answer.
  
  The authors talk a lot about bottlenecks. But their definitions aren’t very helpful and their examples sometimes make things worse. Not only that, in my experience at least, bottlenecks are only one of three things you want to look at if you want to make an organization more effective.
  
  I think of a bottleneck as a place where a process slows down. When you fix the bottlenecks in a process, and you speed the process up. The authors cover bottlenecks, but they ignore two other important things where simple rules can help.
  
  Leverage points are activities that have an outrageously large effect compared to the amount of input. They’re the 20 percent of the things you do that give you 80 percent of the results. Making performance on these things more efficient will have an outsized impact on organizational performance.
  
  Every industry or company has Key Success Factors, the things you must do if you want the organization to succeed. Simple rules can help you perform better on your Key Success Factors.
  
  There are also interesting and helpful things in the book that don’t move the book forward. Two examples are the interesting stories about Roald Amundsen and about Money Ball. There are lessons here, but I’m not sure how they relate to Simple Rules.
  
  Bottom Line
  
  You’ll get good value from this book if all you read is the first few chapters. You can read the rest and draw what lessons you will, enjoy the stories that you enjoy, and think of them as a bonus.
• Medicine invented the ultimate simple rule Triage. Applying simple rules to patient treatment, especially in crisis, allows nurses and doctors to sort out who should be treated first to save as many lives as possible. We all need simple rules to face massive complexity and emergencies. These same rules can help people simplify their lives. For example, I try to never make major decisions after 300 PM because I’m a morning person and I fade in the mid-afternoon. Organizations like the Federal Reserve Board, the state of California and NBC, as well as people like surgeons, pilots and Navy Seals have all developed simple rules to get the best results possible. Simple rules produce better decisions and accelerate decision making under pressure. The characteristics of simple rules follow They are limited to only few rules, customized to a specific group (surgeons, pilots, teachers), focused on a specific decision, and allow for flexibility. Today, complex problems like climate change, healthcare, and terrorism threaten our society and require simple rules to help us deal with them daily. We need simple rules because using complex solutions to such complex problems often leads to paralysis.