Rating: 
Summary: Buy, steal, beg, borrow this book
Review: It's a (radical) wolf in (practical) sheep's clothing. If you only read the first half of this book, you'll be lulled into a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about how helpful and useful it is. (Great 'Getting Started' tips! Will really change how you run projects, communicate and use people's time.) But check out the second half. This guy will really scare the begeebers out of a lot of senior execs. To Jensen, a simpler company is about designing the workplace around you and me...the people doing the work. Buy, steal, beg, borrow this book!
Rating:
Summary: Buy this book
Review: What an unusual combination: Simplicity is 1) practical, 2) compelling, and 3) radical. Jensen says that simplicity is just the discipline of common sense, and he shows how to get disciplined. He's also funny, warm and personable. But anyone reading the second half of this book--Simpler Companies--will discover just how in-your-face he really is. He's advocating that we design our companies around the people who do the work! What a concept. Get Simplicity and find out how to be design simpler companies.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: Think of this book as Studs Terkel meets the Net's latest Rageboys! Bill Jensen is very focused on day-to-day work. His tools and suggestions for creating simpler workdays are awesome. He's also laid out the blueprint for designing companies for the way we all want to talk to each other and share what we know. He's re-writing the rules for how companies use our time and attention. Buy this book! The brilliance of common sense comes through on every page.
Rating:
Summary: This book is a helpful tool
Review: I got Simplicity for one reason. I'm a lathe operator and everything is just getting too complex. What Bill Jensen calls "a world of infinite choices"...that's my life. When he says "enough is enough"...that's me. The tools and ideas in the front half of the book helped me "hit delete" on a lot of the noise my company creates. My days are simpler because I took some of the control away from my company and put it in my own hands.
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Summary: Simplicity is the future!
Review: I'm a college student. Jensen is so on-target when he talks about me and my friends (80 million Net Geners) as a force to be reckoned with. How companies use our time and attention will be a huge criteria in whether we want to work for them. If you are interested in the future of work, this book shows you what tomorrow's workforce will expect and demand.
Rating:
Summary: Great tool for changing how we work
Review: One quote says it all. Jensen closes the book with a touching epilogue. Then says: "Simplicity becomes important only when we stop to consider all the truly amazing discoveries and advances that did not happen today. Or how many opportunities for personal, corporate, and community growth didn't fit into today's 1,440 minutes. All because of the convoluted ways we used people's time and attention." Amen! Get this book and change how your company uses your time and attention.
Rating: 
Summary: Simple, at the beginning. Then lotsa mumbo jumbo
Review: the book is intriguing at the beginning, laying down some good thoughts on how the corporate world became too complex.
Then it gets into a overlong description of technicality of his "simplification" processes that to me it looks very complex. So I basically started skimming the book starting from page 100 on...
Bottom line: good first 100 pages, rest not good. This is my opinion
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Summary: Simplicity is Business 2.0. GET IT !
Review: Building upon a previous review: This book is Cluetrain 2.0, Wheatley/Leadership 2.0, Petzinger/Pioneers 2.0, Tapscott/Digital 2.0, Godin/Permission 2.0! Yet Jensen isn't trying to create the "next big or new idea."What makes Simplicity Business 2.0 is that it's practical. He takes many of the big ideas around us, and answers "where do we go from here?" He details what we need to think about if we are to leverage the Net in a world that's already on choice and info overload. He covers how to communicate effectively, organize one's thinking for faster implementation, storytelling as a business tool, even how to listen and delete most of what is shoveled at us. Jensen also focuses on the needs of Net Geners -- what tomorrow's pioneers will demand of our organizations. The entire book is about what it will take get permission, time and attention from the people who do the day-to-day work. Simplicity is about how our companies need to change so all our big ideas *actually work*. Buy one copy of your favorite new-big idea book. Get LOTS of copies of this book and give them to everyone you know!
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: Great ideas in a tough to navigate format
Review: The best companies out there spend a lot of time talking to their customers. Focus groups, customer surveys and CRM/ One-to-One technologies are growing increasingly common.
Jensen takes this one-step further. Why not build a company that is easy for the front-line employees, who actually interface with your customers, to navigate? A common-sense, win-win scenario. The customers of a simplified business would happier because employees have relevant information at their finger-tips. Employees are happier because they save thousands of frustrating hours spent looking for the exact information they need. Indeed, Jensen advocates turning traditional strategy on its head. He foresees easy-to-navigate companies built from the ground up, merely overseen by executive "steering committees."
Easy-navigation is what Jensen calls "Simplicity." In fact, taming complexity by taking time to sift the important from the trivial grows more vital, and difficult to do, as our businesses grow larger. Because of this, most companies fall quite short when it comes to providing their employees with the tools needed to simply do their jobs. And Jensen does not stop at the theoretical, big-picture level, but presents some excellent tools to help think through these problems: "CLEAR," and "Simpler to Know, Feel, Use, Do and Succeed" are a couple of the most noteworthy.
Though I love Jensen's ideas, I have one major criticism: the book is, quite ironically, one of the most difficult to navigate books I have ever encountered. Side bars cut into text, without any warning, change in text font or background color. Two or three times each chapter, you are left hanging mid-sentence in the main text, while you read a related side-bar... only to forget what the main sentence was talking about. In fact, this caused me to shave the rating from five stars for the content to four for the entire package... and almost had me to three. I found the navigation that frustrating.
Still, I would recommend this book to almost everyone I know in business. The ideas are that good.
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