Simplicity Gets Executed. Complexity Gets Talked About

A case for simplicity as the engine of growth.

"It is not the daily increase but the daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." — Bruce Lee

Complexity is a tax on execution. It compounds quietly. Then one day you look up and everything takes twice as long as it should.

I’ve watched this happen more times than I’d like to admit. The pattern is always the same. Leadership sees a macro shift and gets the organization to spring into action before the problem is clearly defined or the desired outcome is written down. Workstreams multiply. A transformation office appears. A consulting firm is hired to coordinate it all. Decisions slow. Activity increases. Results do not.

This is playing out in real time with AI today. Most organizations are jumping into AI before knowing what problems they are trying to solve. What they are learning is that AI amplifies how you work. If your organization is inefficient, AI makes you faster at the wrong things. As a result, many companies are now finding that too much experimentation is at odds with delivering actual business value. Johnson & Johnson is a public example. After encouraging AI experimentation across the company, they ended up with nearly 900 individual use cases. Most were redundant or simply didn’t work. Only 10% to 15% of use cases were driving 80% of the value. It took a full year to learn what should have come first: define the problem before you build the solution. That is not a technology failure. That is a complexity problem.

Simplicity Is a Strategy

Strategy is as much about choosing what you will not do as what you will do. Most organizations never make that choice. They start with what they already want to build and reverse engineer a customer problem to justify them. The result is a long list of priorities, which is the same as having none.

Simplicity is a focused choice. It starts with defining the outcome so narrowly that the decisions become obvious. I learned this early in my career at Apple. When we were designing early generations of mobile computers, every product decision was a tradeoff. More compute power drained more battery. More battery meant more weight. Optimizing for one hurt the others.

The temptation was to build the most powerful notebook computer possible. That would have produced a great spec sheet and a product built for no one in particular. Instead, we narrowed the customer problem: build the best notebook for an enterprise sales executive who lives in PowerPoint and Word and needs to work through a six-hour cross-country flight without an extra battery.

Clarifying the target customer simplified every other decision. We focused on building a notebook with the best screen, decent compute, and enough battery life to last six hours at the lightest weight in its class. We didn’t build the most powerful laptop. We built the one our customer actually needed. It became their primary machine, the one they carried through airports every week. The narrow problem statement made that possible.

At MoneyGram, we faced this exact choice when building new products. Instead of trying to build a new receiver product for every use case on day one, we simplified the customer problem to one thing: the experience for the person receiving money, starting with just the receipt. That focus changed everything. We stopped guessing at features and started solving the actual customer problem. We had something live in market in just 90 days and have been iterating based on what we’ve learned ever since.

More People Does Not Mean Better Results. Most businesses follow an instinctive, but misguided principle: the more crucial the project, the more people must be thrown at it. The operative theory is that more resources equal better execution and results. But it rarely works out that way. More people mean more coordination, more meetings, and more diffused ownership. The team assigned to solve the problem becomes the problem.

Simplicity Is a Competitive Moat. Simplicity means fewer layers, fewer handoffs, and fewer priorities between the customer and the people doing the work. In a simple organization, small, empowered teams can see what customers are doing, decide what to change, and ship improvements without waiting on a maze of approvals.

At MoneyGram, we used to have 50 people working on the same product with decisions made centrally. Today those same 50 people operate across six smaller teams, each single-threaded with 100% undivided attention to solving one problem end-to-end with decisions made faster by the people closest to the work. The result is a 10x increase in output from the same number of resources. Not because we hired more people. Because we simplified how we work.

A company that learns in weeks instead of quarters compounds that advantage over time. The gap between them and slower competitors widens every cycle. That’s not an easy gap to close.

Simplicity Is Cultural

A CEO can declare “fewer priorities.” Without a culture that enforces it, the organization will add them back faster than leadership can cut them.

This is because complexity is the default. It just shows up. Someone adds a step to the workflow that makes their team’s job easier but slows everyone else down. Someone builds a feature that no one else wants or needs because a single customer asked for it loudly. A leader adds headcount to manage a broken process instead of fixing the root cause. Each decision makes sense in isolation. Together, they can bury you.

Culture is how people act when no one is looking. Three behaviors make simplicity stick.

The first is honesty over politeness. When someone in the room knows an idea is flawed and stays quiet to avoid conflict, the organization spends weeks pursuing something that should have been killed on day one. A culture of simplicity requires people to say what they actually think. What they’d say if the company depended on it, because it does.

The second is the discipline to say no to good ideas. Every organization is flooded with reasonable things to do. But when you take on more than you can execute, you create a backlog that adds nothing but distraction. The discipline is to cut them down to the few that will actually move the business. The goal isn’t to stop having ideas. It is to focus on them at a rate the organization can actually execute. Put the best people and resources on the few things that matter most. Let the rest wait.

The third is small teams with clear owners. Operating decisions made by committees are slow and ineffective. Decisions made by clear owners closest to the details work best. Keep teams small enough that everyone in the room has real ownership and no one can hide. Give small teams real authority and single-threaded focus. One team, one problem, full ownership of the outcome.

Simplicity Wins

I’ve seen what happens on both sides. Companies that let complexity take over usually spend their time talking about what they need to do. Companies that commit to simplicity win.

Before Apple moved to its current headquarters at Apple Park, the company’s marketing team worked in a building just across from 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. When you walk through the front door and past two secured entrances, you turn a corner and face a wall painted with three words in large silver letters: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY. A broad line is drawn through the first two SIMPLIFYs. The message is clear. Keep going until there is nothing left to cut.

Because simplicity gets executed. Complexity gets talked about.

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Thank you to Sydney Schoolfield, Lamia Pardo, Jillian Slagter, Cory Feinberg, Josh Gordon-Blake, Luke Tuttle for reading drafts of this.