Creativity: making the complicated simple.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace;
making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
~ Charles Mingus
Remarkable; easy to read; and filled with practical business wisdom—that is in short how I would describe Faster Cheaper Better by Michael Hammer and Lisa Hershman. It’s no secret: everyone knows that the way a lot of organizations do things can be improved. But where do you start? How do you rethink every aspect of your operations? How do you untangle nasty procedural hairballs? How do you shed tasks that don’t add value? How do you make the complicated simple? For powerful examples from a host of world class organizations on making the complicated simple, check out Faster, Cheaper, Better.
P.S. I was really impressed by the humblness Michael Hammer and Lisa Hershman exhibited in this book. Here is a little taste:
Let’s be clear about something. The principles of process design we’ve just examined will not give you a complete process design. Rather, they will give you an idea for a process design. It takes lots of hard and detailed work to turn a breakthrough concept into a complete description of a new process. But that is not the work managers and businesspeople find so intimidating. The hardest and scariest part is coming up with the big idea in the first place, because implicit in the big idea is big change.
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