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Summary: Everybody should read 'Simplicity' !
Review: 'Simplicity' can inspire and illuminate anyone in business and in life. The profound message in Bill Jensen's book confirms, contributes, strengthens and advances the style of our own business, which is to provide simple yet sophisticated products to help clear the mind and guide the inherent structure and direction of vision.
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Summary: Read This Book
Review: This is must reading for anyone who seeks to be understood. Do you have clients, employees, colleagues, children? Then this means you. But if you lead an enterprise or specialize in corporate communications, HR, or IT, then run, don't walk, to get your copy. This book is that powerful. You won't be disappointed. Readers, note: Reading this book is greatly assisted by its design, art directed by Jensen. The design employs one-page summaries and charts, "Simple Notes" and "Get Started" items, and large type and lots of white space for emphasizing key points.
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Summary: Missed opportunity
Review: Good content, but horrible design/layout. Your sections, chapters, punchlines, quotes and font variety confuse, not clarify. You missed an opportunity to put your recommendations into practice.
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Summary: A reader from the fast paced business world of change
Review: This book lives up to it's title! I found the context to be a powerful statement of the significant issues facing business leaders in the culture change world of business. This book is a must for anyone involved in developing the process of significant and fast paced change.I found the book easy to read and determined it's best value as a handbook to reference in future strategic projects. A great book for the start of this new century!
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Summary: Navigation aid for business white water
Review: Bravo! This book is a tour de force. Although I am a crusty old war horse, I was moved by Bill Jensen's Epilogue. Like the rest of Simplicity, it put the boring, hysterical world of American business in perspective. All leaders and managers should read this book, along with Peter Drucker's views on knowledge workers and Dr. Carla O'Dell's on knowledge sharing. If those leaders dared to take a close look at reality, they would shudder at the control they've already lost. Simplicity is a guidebook for those who have confronted this reality and are seeking to navigate the uncontrollable white water surrounding them.
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Summary: Simplicity & Cluetrain - the dynamic duo your 21st C needs
Review: Perseus publishers have started the 21st Century with two immensely challenging books to the way big business is organised for stimulating common sense relationships between employees and customers. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the colourful book of this dynamic duo. It paints all the human advantages that the age of the internet and internetworking can bring. And as it does so, alarm bells ring as to how few corporate leaders know how to action the highly energised integrity of purpose that resonates through a clued up community where human beings converse about valuable solutions for real needs. To converse with a community (aka your marketplace) unlearning how to shout at the market - where image leads relationship - is part of the magic box that 21st Century leadership must-needs discover. In contrast, "Simplicity - the Competitive Advantage" develops a black (complexity) and white (simplicity) prognosis based on a huge amount of practitioner research. The core thread which develops is both shocking, obvious - and arguably the key to Cluetrain's magic box. Those researched explain that the information which employees in an e-business and digitally empowered world will have to deal is doubling every three years. Surely the key to knowledge will only be turned if a company's organisation helps every employee to filter out which of this information is: 1) actionable for that employee's purpose, 2) needs to be shared with another employee whose shared purpose it is to action it, 3) is noise that needs to be filtered out so that employee and company concentrate on their focus. So here's the wake up call loud and clear. In "Simplicity: The Competitive Advantage" we have all the evidence any judge would need to conclude that many big organisations are busy making work complex rather than simple. When an employee drowns in information, the human kinds of things that happen are stress, lack of time for other human things like your family, or just de-energising of the workplace. Look at the following extracts - does this ring a bell with you? "A weird shift happens when the companies we work for grow large. We start believing that corporate logic - The Plan, The Process, The Whatever -actually governs the choice we make. Whereas simplicity of organisational design should be based on human nature and common sense, not corporate logic. To do this : 1) make the assumption that most people want to do the right thing and make a difference. 2) recognise that we're living in a world of infinite choices, and most people are truly struggling to figure out what will make that difference. (Remember that even if you've created shared mindset, the human need to make one's own choices will play out over time). Conclusion : create order through clarity; invest in how people really make choices. This means understanding why the workforce view of integration in the new economy isn't that of old leadership: New Workforce "Integration is the ability to bring together the information I need at one place at one time so I can make a decision that leads to success". Old Leadership : "Integration is the ability to bring together all the systems, structures, processes, people, capital etc so that the organisation can implement the strategic plan". Don't dismiss the meaning of the above paragraph before you've read this book. In this space, I will just quote one more view of a senior executive surveyed: " I know my industry is going through massive change. So what? What troubles me is that nobody at my company has interconnected how we change." He continued : "Our intranet content isn't linked to our quarterly projects, which aren't connected to our performance management system, which doesn't jibe with compensation design, which doesn't match our departmental goals, which aren't supported by training, which ... you get the idea". Simplicity and Cluetrain Manifesto are fingering the biggest leadership issue confronting the current generation of human beings. In 1984 Norman Macrae of The Economist wrote The 2024 Report - one of the first futures books to portray the enormous social and business wealth to be created by the internetworking age. My father was wrong to predict that the summit of this advance for humankind would be happening circa 2024. It will happen in this decade, or stall for a generation if leaders don't get simple and get clued. And everyone can be involved now in this outcome. To rediscover human common sense in the digital age, we need to connect up openly curious thinkers and leaders. One experiment towards this goal is starting up (late February) at : brandknowledge.com. Here you will find a worldwide panel of over 30 common sense sages - including representative authors of the 3 books I have mentioned - ready and waiting to answer useful questions on the organisational challenges ahead. Equally, if you know somebody who should be connected with this panel's purpose, please e-mail me Chris Macrae at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
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Summary: This is it: New Rules for the New Workplace
Review: Buy this book and revel in changing the rules! From Simplicity: "Heigh ho, heigh ho. Business is investing heavily in integrated planning and coordination. But it's chintzy when it comes to investing in human nature. Change the rules about how companies use your time and attention at work." What's so radical? Pure simplicity: Jensen gets into the nuts-and-bolts of how to change how companies use our time and attention...How companies have conversations with us...How we have conversations with others. This Manifesto is "implementable." You'll change how you communicate and get day-to-day stuff done, as well as changing the company around you. Jensen calls this "the discipline of common sense." We need this kind of radical: A guidebook for changing how people use the 1440 minutes that we have to spend today. Get this book and change the rules for getting stuff done.
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Summary: Finally, there's light at the end of the tunnel!
Review: It's simple. Buy this book! Jensen cuts through complex corporate clutter with a razor sharp knife. This book is a must read for anyone trying to communicate in corporate America. The book is packed with practical tools that can make anyone a better communicator. Jensen holds no punches in delivering this message . An easy read and well worth the time invested. If you're looking for one book to read to improve communication in your company, this is it! Great job Mr. Jensen!
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Summary: Like Taking A Moment To Catch Your Breath
Review: Admit it; it's hard to resist a book that explains how to simplify your organization and "make smarter" your approach to work. Not to mention it's hard to resist any book that quotes both Groucho Marx and Epictetus at the same time. There's symmetry to Bill Jensen's approach to dealing with information overload and the blur of life at internet speed. This book is useful and worth the brief investment of time it takes to read. It's also laid out in a way that shows the author walks his talk when it comes to information design.
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Summary: Yessssssssss!
Review: Start a movement. The simplicity movement. Use this year's entire budget to buy this book for everyone in your company. Hand them out to all of your customers (before your competition does.) It's that important. We just used it at an offsite and it completely changed what we talked about. Simplicity is about real work. Jensen's simplicity manifesto is that we reinvent the workplace according to the needs of the people doing the work. Radical! Go simplicity, go! As Jensen says: Simplicity is power. Take it back. Use it.
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