PROLOGUE

KEEP IT SIMPLE

As the title suggests, this book is a how-to guide for managers who want to find the key to getting things done. But I’m not just talking about getting things done some of the time or even most of the time. I’m talking about getting radically reliable results all the time. To put it in sports terms, this isn’t a book for those who want the great feeling of hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win a baseball game or sinking a three-pointer at the buzzer to win a basketball game. This is for those who want the feeling of leading the baseball league every year in batting average or the feeling of leading the basketball league every year in points and assists. It’s about being so reliable in getting the basic things done that you are viewed as radically successful.

This book was written for three main audiences:

1. New, inexperienced managers who are looking for the proper foundation to get their management careers started on the right track. Let’s face it: Many managers are promoted into a formal leadership role because they are the best individual contributors or because they show a certain spark of potential. But management is a totally different skill from whatever individual role they were playing before their promotion, and too many of those people are left to figure out how to be a manager on their own. This book will provide the foundation that will make the transition to management much easier.

2. Experienced managers who are achieving some degree of success but are looking to improve the consistency of their team’s results. Management is hard, and getting long-term consistency from the team requires tremendous effort. This book will help managers put a structure in place that will lead to consistent results, with the team sharing in the effort.

3. Senior leaders of large organizations who wish to reduce the variability of performance across their frontline teams. If management is hard, then managing managers is even harder. And the larger the organization, the harder it is for leaders to achieve consistent execution throughout. This book can provide a program that establishes a consistent culture and delivers reliable results from the entire team. In the summary at the end of each chapter, I provide some thoughts specifically targeted at senior leaders.

We’ll start our journey to the land of radically reliable results with a look at a concept popularized by a fourteenth-century English Franciscan friar. William of Ockham (Ockham is a small village in Surrey, England) is credited with the phrase “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” Another related phrase attributed to William is “Entities must not be multiplied without necessity.” With these phrases, William meant that one should favor explanations that contain the fewest number of elements or variables. Over time, his concept evolved into the idea that when more than one explanation is posited for a situation, the simplest explanation is likely the correct one. While evidence exists of other philosophers expressing similar thoughts, the concept became known as “Occam’s razor” because of the effectiveness with which William used the idea in his teachings.

Jumping ahead a few centuries (to 2013, to be exact), author Jeff Olson published a self-help book titledThe Slight Edge.1 In this book, Olson makes a very compelling argument that the difference between success and failure, rather than coming from incredible and revolutionary ideas, often boils down to a commitment to doing simple, boring things over and over again, day after day. Early in the book, he uses the example of the Grand Canyon and the fact that this amazing spectacle was created by millions of years of wear from a stream of water, not by some huge, one-time event. Of course, he provides many more examples in the book to support the concept and to help readers apply the ideas to their own lives. I encourage you to give it a read (after you are done withthis book, of course).

How does any of this apply to the world of management? I’ll explain by sharing a personal story. Several years ago, I was leading the North American operations of a London-based retail organization. Most of our stores were in large international airports, and most of our sales volume came from these airport locations. We did have a small handful of stores in a few California shopping malls, and those stores were very successful. Because the opening of those mall-based stores predated my start with the company by many years, I was unfamiliar with the strategic decisions that went into the start of that off-airport channel, and I had no information on why the strategy was stopped after just a few locations. As part of a long-term market growth strategy, my team and I decided to expand the shopping mall presence by opening stores at several more malls across the US.

Upon rolling out twenty or so new locations, it became clear that some were matching the success of the handful of original mall stores and others were struggling. We paused our rollout and began a deep analysis of the new stores to try to find the variables most correlated with success and failure. We looked at the type of store (inline vs. kiosk), the placement within the mall (