“Simple,” by two business consultants, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, is a straightforward brief on simplicity, providing the reader with interesting examples of companies that have successfully embraced it as a business strategy while only occasionally slipping into overly simplistic advice. (“Simplification requires a thorough and pervasive commitment by an organization to empathize, distill and clarify.”)
Siegel and Etzkorn cite a study showing that half of the gadgets returned to stores are “in good working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate them.” The authors also mention a study showing that “80 percent of child safety seats are improperly installed or misused and the instructions for installing them are the root of the problem.”
Identifying such problems hardly equals finding a plausible solution. Etzkorn and Siegel point out that “banks, credit card companies, insurers and other types of businesses find ways to make money from the fine print nobody can read or understand,” and that “lawyers have inundated us with mind-numbing disclaimers, disclosures, terms, instructions, amendments and amendments to amendments” to “avoid lawsuits or other potential problems.”
Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, Grand Central Publishing, 237 pages, $26.99
