Common sense:  In order to succeed I need to do more than the competition.  I need to do more work, provide more content, add more option, and so on and so forth.

Contrarian thinking:  Less is more.  I don’t need to do more busy work.  I need to be smarter about the work I do.  I don’t need to provide more content.  I need to focus on the content that I provide to assure it is high quality and to the point.  I don’t need to give more options.   I need to offer a few options that people actually use.

Efficiency is not Effectiveness

Many people confuse efficiency with effectiveness.  You can be very efficient at something and yet be very ineffective.  Efficiency means that you are producing the maximum amount of output per unit of time.  For example, if you can write 200 emails per day you may be very efficient.  But if those emails are wasted conversations that are not getting you any closer to your goal you are not being very effective.

Effectiveness means that what you are producing is the right output to get you to your desired state.  For example, it may take you an entire two hours to compose one email, but if that one email is so well written that it will close a huge deal that will help you meet you target, then you are being very effective.

In this case it is not the number of emails that matters, it is the quality of the one critical email that will make you effective.  Less is more.

Fewer Words Say More

I once went to a sales meeting where several salesmen presented their accounts and the deals that they closed.  Many of the salesmen had elaborate PowerPoint presentations with dozens of slides talking about all the minute details of their accounts.  Most took about an hour to get to the point that the people in charge were really interested in:  How much did you sell?  Many of these salesmen had closed deals of about $2-10 million.

Then one salesman took his turn to present.  He only had one slide.  It said in huge fonts:  $400 Million.  Any questions?   Less is more.

The KISS Principle

KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid!  Whatever you work on, keep it simple.  The more words you add the more difficult it is to understand.  The more options you offer, the more complex it becomes.  The more colors you add, the busier it looks.  The more people involved, the more difficult it will be to make decisions.  Keep it simple.  More is less.

Don’t create more for the sake of creating more.  In the spirit of eating my own dog food, I will stop right here.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Social Bookmark this post: