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Preface

GREG LOCKWOOD

My job is to invest in businesses, so I am a professional sceptic. Instinctively, I dislike simplistic mantras and the latest management fad. I am predisposed to think that there is a lot of detail and nuance required to make businesses successful, and that the personalities who run a new company are all important. So, in many ways, I’m an odd co-conspirator with Richard, whose world-view is much more reductionist than my own — or that of just about anybody else I know!

Yet, during the fourteen years I’ve known Richard, he has helped me to understand that certain crude rules of thumb — while not invariably true — often contain concentrated insights and predictive power. The Star Principle and the 80/20 Principle are two well-validated examples. Richard’s rules are always easy to grasp, easy to communicate and, perhaps most importantly, create the philosophical resolve that leads to action. In business, being mostly correct and decisive typically yields better results than taking the time to figure out what is perfectly correct.

The simplification of business, by reducing innovation to two alternative strategies — proven in practice — is a natural extension of Richard’s 80/20 and Star principles. He simplifies the practice of strategy as well as the art of making businesses simple and highly effective.

A final attraction of the subject is that it deals with innovation in its most impactful sense. We often think of innovation as invention. There is rightly a cult of the inventor: after all, it takes a very special person to extend the bounds of knowledge, to create something fresh, or to conquer an unsolved problem. However, the first creation of knowledge touches few people. Those who deliver the most economic benefit to humanity are the simplifiers, the people who bring the fruits of invention and discovery to mass markets.

Benefit × People affected is when the world really changes, and where the highest economic rewards reside. The inventors deserve their pedestals. Equally, though, we should celebrate those who bring extraordinary value-for-money to millions. This is the cult of the simplifier.