Remember KISS? Keep it simple stupid..

On Friday I had a heated dispute with Microsoft Word. It almost won. Touch and go. What is the most irritating is its tendency to think it knows what I want to do next. Well I don’t want to do that next!

One remembers fondly back to the days of the first word processing software. The excitement when one could correct a word before printing it or even more wonder if it could be made bold or italic. Of course the typewriter was something else again, but those early word applications were a miracle.

What has happened in the meantime is that they have become so complex one needs to graduate from Microsoft college to cope. Whether MS Word or WordPerfect, never mind Excel or Apple’s Numbers and as for page lay-out apps they are far too complex to use effectively.

Oh for that lovely simple and straightforward original Adobe Pagemaker.

Having just had this minor irritating experience I was definitely in the mood to read an article by Clay Shirky in which he commented about complex business models and their demise. When things become so complex that they are totally unwieldy, then we tend to have a collapse.

In fact some societies have collapsed totally due to becoming far too complex. Maybe that is also why mergers and acquisitions generally don’t do too well. To run these large businesses just becomes too complex.

Such complexity means that the entity is unable or unwilling to move with the times, adapt to new societies, markets and more. Is this why the Christian church in Europe and England is almost confined to the history books? There are too many layers of people and traditions to allow these religious organisation to move with the times and adapt their doctrine to something that resonates with the modern people.

Let’s take this same principle of simplicity or complexity and check your business. How complex is your business? Do you have an order system that requires the sign off of five different departments. Or do you have a sales person who talks directly to your production department?

How easy is it for a client to speak to the decision maker? In the banking environment for instance it’s almost impossible to get to somebody who has any decision making power. That is if you are a small client. It changes of course proportionally to the wealth you have.

So how easy is it for big business to listen to clients or change their product range to serve new clients in new markets? Not that easy. And it means that big companies find themselves bankrupt in both ideas or money because they are unwieldy and complex. Take the motor industry as an example.

It’s also a reason why the internet grew at such a pace. There were a myriad tiny service providers who had a few hundred clients, looked after them well, knew them all personally and did things any old way as long as it worked.

Once the internet becomes controlled by umpteen laws and standards that need to be followed, the complexity will eventually destroy it. Just alone a law that makes internet service providers legally responsible for content their users upload will kill off the small service providers.

They just cannot afford the software and it’s constant updates required to control all content that flows through their servers mainly because the evil doers are so resourceful in keeping themselves ‘alive’ on the web.

Want to build a house in the developed world? You have to fight umpteen government and local departments before you are able to put one brick on the next.

See how quickly buildings go up in Vietnam. The work force sleeps on site. This means they work seven days a week. Morning to night. And sleep on wooden floors with a plastic sheet draped around the structure for some shelter from the weather. Health and safety regulations? Not that one can see. But at least the city is being rebuilt rapidly and people have work.

It would seem a good idea to keep ones business lean and mean. Definitely have less layers of command, as few rules and regulations you can get away with and a work force prepared to be innovative in its approach to clients, service and products. It will certainly keep the business alive longer than if you regulate it to death. And it’ll be a fun place to work at.