Simplify Your Business
Posted by Jonathan Iannacone on Mon, Dec 03, 2007 @ 03:03 PM
One of the habits we have determined is a strong predictor of success is focus. A compliment to focus is simplicity. Take an objective look at your business, is it simple or complex? Are your processes and work-flows bloated with extra steps? How successful are your training programs and new employee orientations?
Until you simplify your business you will have limited success focusing you and your company on its strengths.
Here is a daily routine of someone that I admire and who I think really has simplicity down to a science.
1. He woke up and read the morning newspaper. Something he does everyday.
2. He got into car and drove himself to work and arrived shortly before 9am.
3. On this day he received only 13 phone calls, including one wrong number.
4. He does not carry a cell phone nor have a computer on his desk.
5. There were no urgent meetings today. Instead he found time in the day to work on new song lyrics for a birthday party for a friend, and to demonstrate a newspaper-throwing technique he learned while delivering papers as a boy.
6. Although he is an accomplished businessman, his company is run very efficiently. The headquarters is staffed by just 17 employees and has no public-relations, human-relations, investor-relations or legal departments. He writes only one letter each year to the managers in his company, giving them goals for the year.
7. He leaves the office between 5 and 6pm.
8. He returns to the same small house that he bought after he got married 50 years ago and says it has everything he needs in that house.
9. He spends his evenings and weekends doing his favorite hobbies: playing bridge and watching his college football team.
Do you know who it is?...
It's Warren Buffett (sources WSJ 11/12/05 article, CNBC "The Billionaire Next Door).
The 2nd richest man in the U.S. who heads Berkshire Hathaway, a company with the 7th largest market cap, has managed to keep his business (and life) this simple.
If he can do it, can we really have any viable excuses?
Listen to Thoreau, or look at your iPod....Simple is better.