My favorite books for simplifying your organization

One of the keys to simplifying your organization, and your life, is the ability to communicate clearly, quickly, and powerfully.

Todd Cherches, the author of Visual Leadership, is a master at doing this. In his book, he makes the saying “a picture is worth 1000 words” come alive. Without needing to be an artist, Todd shows you how to use diagrams, sketches, visual metaphors, simple graphs, and all sorts of visual imagery to make your communications more powerful, fun, and memorable. 

Not only that, but Todd also practices what he preaches – so the book is filled with stories and anecdotes that make it not only a useful read, but an enjoyable one as well.  

Lisa Bodell is a fanatic about eliminating mundane and unnecessary tasks from your everyday routines.

In Why Simple Wins, Lisa provides a playbook to help you do just that – from getting control of your calendar to setting priorities to cutting back on meetings and emails. Having worked on some common clients with Lisa, I’ve seen the power of what she helps managers do – and I’ve seen how much synergy there is between our approaches. 

It’s the kind of book that you’ll have no regrets about buying.

I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I was in college many (many) years ago, and it fundamentally changed the way I think about organizational change and innovation. 

Written by a physicist, the book is about the philosophy and history of science and how we make advances in knowledge. Kuhn argues, and provides plenty of examples, of how science isn’t just the slow accumulation of data, but is actually influenced by “paradigms” that help us make sense of the data. Every so often however data emerges that doesn’t fit the paradigm. 

At first this kind of anomalous data is disregarded or its integrity is questioned. Eventually, after much struggle, the data that “doesn’t fit” becomes the starting point for a new and revolutionary paradigm which changes how we see the world.

OK, this sounds pretty theoretical. But think about organizations and simplicity. Many of our standard organizational practices are based on the paradigm of “control” – that the purpose of an organization is to make sure individuals behave within certain norms. Over time however, these norms can become bureaucratic straightjackets that severely limit innovation and creativity. 

One of the keys to simplification is to question these kinds of paradigms: Do we really need to keep track of how much time anyone works? Do we need to do our work in the office? Do we need to do key tasks with full-time internal people, or can we find partners?

Reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has helped me ask these kinds of questions over the years – and can help you to do so as well.

Yes, Stella is a book – but it’s really a fable about how to cut through corporate inertia and bureaucracy to drive innovation.

When I first read it, I was blown away – a story about farm animals saving their farm from bankruptcy – with lots of clear and compelling messages. And it was actually fun to read. Since I first learned about it from one of the authors (we were working with a common client), I’ve recommended it to lots of other executives, and it’s made a difference.

One of the key lessons from Stella is that truly transformative innovation often needs to be separated from the core business – with different resources, budgets, metrics, and expectations. Otherwise it’s going to be in competition with the core business – and it will end up getting the short end of the stick in terms of money and people.

Then when the innovation is on more solid ground, it can be re-integrated into the company for purposes of scaling it.  All of this is easy to say – but Stella makes it come alive.

It’s not easy to reduce complexity and drive simplification with your team or organization. 

To do so you need to become the best leader you can be. For many managers this means working on their deficiencies, bolstering their weaknesses, and trying as hard as possible to learn new behaviors. 

What Kaplan and Kaiser recommend in Fear Your Strengths however is not to focus first on weaknesses but rather to start development by becoming aware of strengths that you might be overdoing.

This is an incredibly simple, but counter-intuitive approach to leadership development.  In essence, it suggests that leaders often get into trouble by dialing up what they do well. For example, a manager who is good at strategy sometimes makes the strategy so complex that it becomes difficult for others to understand it or carry it out. 

Conversely a manager who is good at execution can sometimes get caught up in the details and not be able to communicate the larger picture.  

Having known Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser for many years, and seen how effective this approach can be, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s clearly written, has lots of good examples, and gives the reader practical tools for dealing with their strengths, and becoming a better leader.