Simply Effective

SIX

Strategy for Simplicity

CONSIDERED SEPARATELY, THE FOUR SOURCES of complexity—structure, products, processes, and management behavior—can all be attacked with various tools and approaches. But sometimes the real task is to put these tools and approaches together to wage a comprehensive war on complexity and create an ongoing culture of simplification and productivity. That’s the focus of this chapter—how to weave the available tools into an integrated and sustainable strategy for simplification.

To begin, consider General Electric, a company that has used simplification as a driver of productivity for more than twenty years.¹

Building Simplicity into the Culture of GE

By rights, managing GE should be one of the most complex operations on ...