Last Friday found me sitting in the office with a number of colleagues watching another corporate briefing. I say briefing rather than call as the executive team had decided to try and do the briefing through a live video conference broadcast. Now while I am the first to say that some of my colleagues have the perfect faces for radio, it was good to be able to see the team present some key facts about their business and the challenges they face. While the words were clear and powerful, being able to see the body language really made a difference. I hope they will repeat the process again.
And the best bit was that the technology didn’t work very well.
On at least a couple of occasions we (and I guess the presenters) lost the slides that were accompanying the presentation. And the picture quality, using the in house video conference facilities sometimes blurred a little, and as speakers changed we saw the support technician duck out of the shot as the camera worked its way around.
It was not 100% perfect and you know that just made it better; no one could say that this was an over engineered solution.
And it’s this over engineering that is something that I think we have got in the habit of. I never cease to be amazed at just how many problems we seek to design out, or how any solution for a problem seems to need more back ups, plans B, C and D and alternative arrangements than most nuclear power stations require.
I sat in a meeting a while ago with 41 other people who all seemed to feel that they had some role to play in launching a new product. Can you imagine how well designed (for which read massively over engineered) that product was? Can you imagine why it took 12 months to design and build – let alone get into the market place? Can you imagine what a real live customer might have said if they’d actually wanted to buy it,
“So let me get this right – I give you a lot of cash and you give me the product in 18 months?”
“yes – well probably, we have another 27 people to take a look at it first and see what else we need to do with it”
So what are we going to do about it? I have a very simple solution – its called doing just about enough. Not too much but just enough.
Lets get back to the principle of 80/20. Do enough to focus on getting 80% of the way and then move on – don’t try for the final 20%. Once you get 80% of the way there you can test what you’re trying to do, see if it makes sense, check it and change it. If you go for 100% two things are likely to happen
- you’ll get to 95% and find that you get stuck. Reaching for that final 5% lands you right in the middle of the ‘law of diminishing returns’.
- And if you keep pushing for this last 5% its very likely that your competitors won’t and they’ll race past you. And where is the fun in that.
Getting to 80% is hard enough, trying for the last 20% is just so much harder. And you’ve probably got a lot more interesting things to do. Like finding a new blog to read…
So please don’t do 100% of the wrong thing, do 80% of the right thing – simply…
The Burble 