Rating: 
Summary: Awesome for what a book can do
Review: Let's start with ourselves: Throw out the reviews that say the author walks on water. Throw out the negative reviews that expected the author to solve all their problems, or deal with a complex subject in too-few pages. Jensen delivers extremely well within the limitations of what a book can do. In the first section he details the challenge of choice- and info-overload in ways that bring it home to our own behaviors. He holds each of us accountable for our own solutions. Then he delivers the tools for those solutions. I can personally vouch for the fact that his approach to behavioral communication, storytelling, listening, and working backwards from people's needs have truly changed how my team interacts. Once we understood the power of clarity through use of the tools, we took on the accountability. This book didn't change our entire world. Just a valuable portion of how we try to work smarter and faster. For me, whenever a book can help me do that, it's awesome.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a pity
Review: The topic is right - and the direction is correct. However: A book on simlicity should be more simple, more structured and especially more to the point. I may say this because I know the challenge on a day to day basis: - How to communicate IT-Value to top management ? - How to explain business to IT people ? - Why should some thousand sales people work with our applications ? What's in for them in using their PC ? If you have to do that you soon learn the value of simplicity and a basic understanding of how it works. If you've worked through that book you probably get some sense of it, however: - It takes you longer than necessary. - It doesn't help you so much in applying simplicity. - Instead you find assertions like those that teams don't help you with simplicity - If you ever worked in a non-teambased environment, you know that that assertion is - simply - WRONG.
Rating: 
Summary: Learning to Cope with the Information Age
Review: We have been aware for a while that the rapid development of technology over the last century has outstripped our society's moral development. Efforts are made to redress the effects of this imbalance, but they often seem to sputter, or simply get left behind as our attention is again transfixed by the latest technology. The information age exacerbates this situation through the information overload we constantly face, disguising that technology has also outstripped our cognitive development. Bill Jensen tries to deal with this situation by proposing that organizations do a couple things - use time differently, and work backwards from what people need. Jensen notes that Bureau of Labor statistics show that 75% of the American workforce is in need of greater literacy skills. His approach to this is to provide user friendly, elegant interfaces that help people make sense out of incoming information. Much of the book is devoted to going simply and slowly over the various aspects of how to implement such practices. It has practical applications laid out clearly, and stories to illustrate how some companies today are already working simpler. Jensen says that this information and cognitive overload is what Toffler was calling future shock. His approach is to frame work and information to match the abilities of workers, unleashing people's love of doing a good job. The complexity of work that inhibits this is seen to result from sloppy mental habits tied into an attitude of power and control. Jensen requires leadership to let go of such old fashioned ideas, showing that they are an illusion anyway - people make decisions based upon the meaning they create, not the corporate plan. Helping them make meaning helps them work faster and better, thus the new competitive advantage. While this book does a good job of identifying and providing alternatives to some major issues of our technology and information driven society, and will be extremely useful for many, it does not address the deeper issue - how can leaders' facilitate the cognitive growth of workers? This is a sensitive issue in our post-modern relativistic society, where there is little desire to recognize the need for deep levels of personal and cognitive growth beyond the age of about twenty. It would seem that talking about evaluating leadership in terms of the leader's ability to foster continuing learning, not of more information, but of deeper qualities of being, is taboo. Jensen does hint at the challenges for leaders in having a sufficient cognitive ability to integrate change efforts, maintain mental discipline, and let go of power and control methods. But he is more focused on creating useful ways to handle the demands of modern organizational life. In this context the book is a good guide to bringing about something we could all use more of - simplicity.
Rating:
Summary: Moving Revolutions from the Possible to the Do-Able
Review: Quotes from two of my favorite books...From Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel: "Our dreams are no longer fantasies but possibilities." And from Simplicity: "Platitudes aside, our biggest limit is no longer the reach of our imagination. It's our ability to order, make sense of, and connect everything demanding our attention...Enough is enough." Different books. Written for different reasons. Yet they're joined at the hip with a premise that runs throughout Simplicity: "Change all you want. Just know that execution happens at the speed of sense-making." Simplicity is a great how-to companion to Revolution or any other biz-bible you love. Because Jensen's focus is changing how we get things done by changing how we communicate with each other. And isn't that where any Revolution starts, succeeds or fails? My personal faves: Behavioral Communication (Chap 6) and Designing Content for Decision-Making (Chap 11).
Rating:
Summary: A Swift Kick to the Head
Review: Here are the top three reasons that you should buy this book: 1. You've heard a lot about making work simpler, but you don't have any idea how to put "simpler" practices into place. Jensen drops several bombs in this book, most of them in the form of great tools for anyone in a management position. The theory is outlined quickly and without pretense and then the tools hammer home the essentials. This book is very good at getting you to reevaluate you thinking processes immediately. Everyone from CEOs down to front-line managers will benefit from these tools. 2. Your formerly small, fast-moving new media startup is experiencing growing pains. That's the case in my company, where we've gone from 60 employees to well over 400 in the US. My outlook on the state of my company has expanded dramatically since reading this book, because it effectively diagnosed the key problem: the business strategy and company values have become divorced from the day to day activities of employees. Simplicity is a handbook for living by your values and getting through growth phases in an organization, on project teams, and everywhere else. Again, managers need this information, but so do employees, who will feel empathy with the data from Jensen's study and find ways to make their job easier in the short term, and tools to manage upwards and change the way things work in the organization in the long view. 3. You're tired of management/business books that simply spout platitudes. Jensen engages the reader with lots of different layouts and chapter summaries that inform without dumbing down. He's clearly got a line on multiple intelligence theory, because the book shakes up conventional data presentation techniques in favor of eye-catching (and therefore memory engaging) presentations. This book walks the talk by developing ways to make complex messages easily understandable. The swift kick to the head, in my case, has helped me truly become more effective and to demand change from the leaders in my organization. I first checked this book out of a library but I now own a copy, and it's been read twice, dogeared and scribbled in. The fact that you can also go to the companion website to download the results of the study that formed the basis of the book is great for analytical types. Buy it, read it, give it to your CEO.
Rating:
Summary: Helped turn our ideas into action
Review: I work for a dot com in San Francisco and I am charged with pulling together organizational knowledge and making sense out of our daily chaos. And I can tell you, everyone in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area needs what Simplicity offers in a big way! It's a simple simple idea - most people wish for effective "tools" to do their job. This simple idea has helped me enormously. Not just in the creation of materials and processes for end-users and front line employees but also in helping the executive team support our actions. Tactical planning is no longer a matter of faith or guesswork - we cite the book and do it! If you think your company/department/team ought to be running more smoothly or working more effectively and you struggle with how to get there, then pick up this book. It's about simple ideas and simple actions that ANYONE can take to make a difference. IMHO this should be required reading for any manager in the rapidly morphing "dot.economy". Bill Jensen is a major league mind and a peer to Drucker and Peters. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Between The Spines
Review: There is so much depth between the spines of the cover of this book "Simplicity" that the author knew that he had to break up the text with tools and easy-to-use ideas in order to keep the reader from taking in to much at one time. All of our society needs to learn from the concepts of this book and apply them, not only to business, but to their personal lives as well. Life and business has grown more and more complex, but Bill Jensen shows us how to identify the problems, cut out the clutter and the mess, how to work with others in this information age and in doing so how to gain control of our companies and our personal lives. This is a book that will definitely get you out of the box you are in and lift you over and up until you see the path more clearly than ever. Kudos to Bill Jensen for the work that he and his team have put into this masterpiece. It has changed this business owner forever.
Rating:
Summary: Get Simple. Get Simplicity!
Review: Simplicity has been a terrific resource in helping our project leaders compete on clarity, and for our senior leadership team to think differently about how our company gets built. e.g., Our project leaders used ideas from Chapter 12, Simpler to Do, as well as others, to change how we approached Change Management. And, although I have to admit...not every one of our senior execs is there yet -- they did use Simplicity to change the agenda of their most recent offsite. Jensen's views on building "user-centered" infrastructures really changed what they talked about. I highly recommend reading this book if you're interested in working smarter as well as faster.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Tool for Successful Change
Review: Simplicity is the best book for making a real impact on the success of an organization that I've ever read. Outstanding!!!
Rating: 
Summary: NOT AT ALL SIMPLE
Review: While Bill has some very good ideas, this book is almost unreadable. Pages suddenly move from 12 pitch to 16 pitch to 20 pitch type, numbering is reversed to suit a point at will, double and triple line spaces come and go, bold type is spread here and there - it will give you glasses if you read it in one session. Secondly, while part of the title, no where does the concept of Competitibve Advantage get defined - Read Jay Barney "Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage" Addison-Wesley 1997 to get a good start on what exactly you are looking for. Bill's core points are spread out over the 210 pages - if you cut out the quotes the book would be 25% shorter and much better for it. What he says is great - know exactly what you want to do, why you want to and what success will look like, and tell others in terms they can understand, and make sure they understand. I would suggest that you read someone elses copy before you think about purchasing this book. It's good but not great.
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