Another example of expertly used simplicity: Google. Here’s a story from the business biography Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain, by Richard L. Brandt. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, once received an unusual response from someone following her blog. It was simply the number 37. Mayer didn’t know what this meant, so she went through her email history to see if the person had sent other messages. He had—nothing but single numbers: 33, 53, and then one that said: “61, getting a bit heavy, aren’t we?” There was also a comment: “What happened to the days of 13?”
Marissa soon realized that the emails were appearing on the day she launched changes on Google’s home page, and the numerals referred to the number of words on the page. She had thought she was keeping the page simple, but it didn’t occur to her to count the words on it—which is now her standard procedure. At this time, the company won’t allow more than twenty-eight.
Simplicity can apply to an idea, a goal, or a mission, as in the case of Surgeons OverSeas (SOS), founded by thirty-five-year-old Dr. Peter Kingham and forty-five-year-old Dr. Adam Kushner.
Both Peter and Adam grew up in the New York City area, Peter in Larchmont and Adam in Manhattan. Peter studied the history of medicine at Yale, and while in medical school at SUNY Stonybrook, he volunteered in a medical clinic in rural Tanzania. Later, as a surgical resident at New York University Medical Center, he worked in Malawi as a Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson international health scholar. Today he is an attending surgeon in the Division of Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgery at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Adam, the son of a physician, studied history at Cornell University. His interest in trauma surgery crystallized a month before medical school when, in Yugoslavia at the start of the Bosnian War, he watched helplessly as his guide died from a gunshot wound.
Having met while doing medical work in developing countries, Peter and Adam realized they shared a goal: to help local surgeons develop the skills they needed to save lives. With SOS, they made that goal the core value of their organization. Instead of importing teams of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses, or teaming up with vast global medical organizations, SOS focuses on streamlining medical processes and empowering local surgeons to act independently of outside help.
This is how Peter and Adam describe their mission: “As surgeons, we know how good it feels to go to developing countries and do a large number of operations, but we realized that if we could teach local surgeons, or even help local surgeons teach junior doctors in their own country, we could really make a difference. The local surgeons are the experts. We can assist with teaching material, supplies, and moral support, but for the long term it is up to them. It’s their country after all; shouldn’t they have the skills to care for their own population?” That’s SOS’s constant and simple focus, from which it never strays.
Simplicity of mission helps your customers focus on the true value you provide. Take the case of In-N-Out Burger. This privately held hamburger chain, founded in 1948 by Harry and Esther Snyder, now has almost 250 stores across the western United States. The Snyders’ plan was always simple: “Give customers the freshest, highest-quality foods you can buy and provide them with friendly service in a sparkling clean environment.” That’s all they’ve done for more than six decades.
There aren’t many choices at In-N-Out: Basically, you order a burger and fries and a beverage. There’s nothing complicated, including the décor, as every store is colored in basic red, white, and yellow. And yet In-N-Out was one of only a few restaurant chains mentioned positively by author Eric Schlosser in his bestselling exposé of fast-food chains, Fast Food Nation; Schlosser praised In-N-Out for using natural, fresh ingredients, as well as for treating its employees well.
“Keep it real simple. Do one thing and do it the best you can,” says Harry Snyder.
Simple ideas are also easily adaptable to changing times—and sometimes they never have to be adapted at all. One hundred forty years ago, a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis wrote a letter to a wealthy San Francisco businessman, offering his unusual but potentially profitable idea for improving the quality of workers’ pants. The merchant to whom Davis wrote had emigrated from Bavaria to New York City and then headed for San Francisco to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush. Instead of panning for gold, however, the young immigrant started a dry-goods business that imported clothing, umbrellas, handkerchiefs, and bolts of fabric to be sold to merchants, including Davis, all along the West Coast.
When many of his customers complained that their pants were falling apart, Davis had come up with the simple idea that sewing metal rivets at the pockets’ stress points would create durability—but he didn’t have the sixty-eight dollars it would cost to file for a patent, so he reached out to the young immigrant-turned-businessman and asked if he might want to work with him. The businessman was enthusiastic about the idea, and on May 20, 1873, a patent was granted. These rivet-reinforced pants, in fundamentally the same design, are still popular today. Jacob Davis’s partner was Levi Strauss.
Here are some more simple ideas that have become great companies:
CHIPOTLE: After graduating from culinary school in 1990, twenty-five-year-old Steve Ells moved to San Francisco and frequented the taco and burrito joints that had sprung up in the city’s Mission District. Ells’s idea: Create a high-quality Mexican-food experience using organic ingredients and naturally raised meat while keeping the menu as simple as possible and using assembly-line techniques for speedy service. In 1993, with a loan from his father, Ells opened the first Chipotle in Colorado. Today there are more than 1,000 Chipotle restaurants in thirty-eight states, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In 2010, their net income was $178 million and they employed 26,500 people.
CRAIGSLIST: While working as a computer-security architect, forty-three-year-old Craig Newmark started a small email list to keep friends updated on local art and technology events in San Francisco. His subscriber base increased rapidly, and in 1996, Newmark decided to create a free website, called craigslist, that closely modeled the typical classified ads in newspapers. It became an instant hit. Today craigslist has expanded to more than 700 cities in seventy countries around the world, and it is the seventh-most-trafficked website in the United States.
DAILYCANDY: Frustrated with the agonizingly slow pace of magazines, in 2000 writer Dany Levy decided to create an email newsletter featuring style and fashion tips, dining recommendations, and cool events happening in New York City. She called her newsletter “DailyCandy” and sent it off to about 700 friends, family members, and people she considered influential. The tone of the emails was light and fun, and it worked: Today, DailyCandy editions are sent out in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In 2008, Comcast purchased DailyCandy for $125 million.
DONORSCHOOSE: In 2000, twenty-five-year-old Charles Best was working as a social studies teacher in the Bronx. Frustrated by the lack of resources in public schools, Best sensed that people wanted to donate to education—but wanted a way to connect directly with individual classrooms. So he invented the website DonorsChoose.org. There, public-school teachers make requests for specific items they need for their classrooms, from pencils to musical instruments, and donors browse the requests and give any amount that inspires them. All donors receive a thank-you note from the teacher making the request, photos of the ongoing project, and a report showing how the money was spent. As of this writing, DonorsChoose has raised more than $73 million and helped more than three million students in 35,000 public schools across the country.
HEIFER INTERNATIONAL: Heifer International’s simple idea: Livestock has the power to lift families out of the poverty cycle. The organization was first conceived in 1939 when relief worker Dan West, rationing powdered milk to refugees of the Spanish Civil War, realized that handouts would never be enough—poor families needed animals to plow their fields, t
o produce milk and eggs they could use to feed their children, and to leave behind manure they could use to improve the quality of their soil. Today, Heifer International gives livestock from goats to water buffalo to rural families in more than 125 countries.
Heifer also teaches the importance of planting trees, collecting manure for organic fertilizer, preventing overgrazing, and planning for long-term success. Recipients take part in the giving cycle by agreeing to share one or more of their animals’ offspring with others; Heifer calls this “Passing on the Gift.”
NETFLIX: After selling his software-engineering company in 1997, thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur Reed Hastings turned his attention to an entirely different business: DVD rentals. At the time, people were accustomed to going to Blockbuster or a local video store to pick up their VHS tapes. Hastings’s simple idea: Put DVDs in the mail and send them directly to people’s homes. Today Netflix offers more than 100,000 titles online and has ten million monthly subscribers. Back in 2007, the company announced its one billionth DVD delivery. Wow!
SOUTHWEST AIRLINES: In 1966, Texas entrepreneur Rollin King showed his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, a triangle he’d drawn on a cocktail napkin. The triangle represented the state of Texas; on each point, King wrote the name of a city: Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. At the time, flying between these cities was inconvenient and expensive; King wanted to create a low-cost intrastate airline servicing this Texan triangle. Kelleher liked the idea. Today the company he founded, Southwest Airlines, carries more passengers per year than any other airline and posts a profit every year. The secret? They keep things simple by making Southwest the absolutely cheapest option for passengers on short-distance flights. Kelleher, who stepped down as CEO in 2008, once said, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are the low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”
Many who opt for simplicity in their business model also seek it in their business space. Personally, I am more creative when I’m not surrounded by a lot of stuff. That’s why I have some of my best ideas on airplanes, where there are no distracting gadgets, emails, or phone calls. This is also why TOMS’ current work space is essentially a warehouse with no offices. Every employee has a plywood workstation that resembles a small cube, and because the cubes are only four and a half feet tall, they’re as easy to talk over as a backyard fence. This setup encourages easy and quick communication—anyone can talk to anyone else at any time; there is little division between the top executives and the customer-service people. If someone has a question, they just stand up and ask. As we are in the process of building our next headquarters, we are keeping this kind of open arrangement.
As mentioned in Chapter 4, you don’t need bells and whistles to run a business. All you really need is a website, business cards, and a place where you can work. Outside of that, you can meet at Starbucks, you can get office help from FedEx Office, you can use the postal facilities at Mail Boxes Etc., you can hire an answering service, and you can rent a by-the-hour conference room.
Many companies, small and large, have adopted the simple model. For example, Netflix no longer has vacation or sick policies, because keeping track of all this data was expensive and overtaxed the human-resources department. If a company has the right employees, they won’t take advantage of paid days off—they’ll leave only when it makes the most sense for them to do so.
The office has changed a lot … but we’re still true to our humble roots.
Semco is a fast-growing company in Brazil that manufactures everything from boat pumps and industrial-strength dishwashers to mixers and scales. Its CEO, Ricardo Semler, has created the simplest of work environments: He took down all office walls, removed dress codes, and eliminated time cards. Even simpler, he allows employees themselves to decide which managers they want to work for and to set their own salaries (which are then posted publicly). This simplicity has helped the company grow from a $4-million business to a $200-million one since Ricardo took over the reins.
Costco is another company with a simplicity-minded leader. CEO Jim Sinegal believes that if his company is supposed to stand for savings and simplicity, so should he. At the company’s headquarters in Washington, Sinegal’s desk is an ordinary table that he bought from a used-furniture store more than twenty-five years ago. Much of the other furniture in the office is left over from the company that owned the building before Costco.
The easier it is for someone to understand who you are and what you stand for, the easier it will be for that person to spread the word to others. Having a clear function, design, and purpose means that your story can be spread easily, whether you’re pitching it to investors or chatting to riders in elevators. Someone must understand it before they can adopt it or purchase it. It’s really that simple.
Keeping it simple means the message is also sticky. When people hear a catchy phrase or idea, it stays in their head and they tell others. That’s why so many of the greatest taglines and mantras in the corporate world have been the most direct. You are constantly being bombarded by messages from companies wanting your attention and your business. The more straightforward that message, the more likely it is to penetrate your filters.
You don’t have to wait to start a business to enjoy simplicity. I’ve found that simplicity in life can be as important as it is in business.
Early on in TOMS’ Shoe Drops, I (like countless others before) noticed that the people we met who seemed the happiest were most often those who possessed the least. The kids in the rural areas we visited, who owned little, often radiated a kind of joy about life that we saw far less frequently in the urban areas. The more I thought about this, the more obvious it seemed: Complicated lives and heaps of possessions don’t necessarily bring happiness; in fact, they can bring the opposite.
After that revelation, I decided to get rid of most of my belongings and move onto a sailboat. At the time, I was living in a nice loft in Venice, a typical bachelor pad featuring a huge television, fancy entertainment system, cool furniture, gourmet kitchen with two stoves, special refrigerator to keep wine at the perfect temperature, and artwork on all the walls; it was filled with cameras, clothes, shoes, and all the other junk we human beings collect. The more I looked around, the more I saw that I owned far too much stuff, little of which I really needed.
When I moved onto a 200-square-foot sailboat, I had no room for these belongings. So I divested myself, selling and giving away almost everything, keeping only sporting equipment and the books I loved. (One day, when I own a house, I’ll keep a full library of books. Books are different from other possessions—they’re more like friends.)
Once I got rid of all those things, I felt remarkably free. That led to greater peace of mind and, from a business standpoint, more creativity. Without clutter, I think more clearly than I ever have.
The move to the boat was my catalyst for simplicity. Now ask yourself: How much do you really need in life? How many clothes? How many toys? Look around you. Maybe before you can come up with the simple idea that’s going to be your next step in business, you need to create a simple environment in which to live and work.
One of my favorite photos from the first Shoe Drop in Argentina.
Here are a few starter tips:
There’s so much to keep track of, and the mind can retain only so many things. Rather than trust that I’ll remember something and add it to the clutter of information already floating through my mind, I write down everything that’s important, whether it’s the name of someone I want to meet or a sudden idea for a new design. When you write things down, you let your mind off the hook, giving it more room for things like problem-solving or spontaneous creativity.
Seriously—how much do you need? The fact is, the more you have, the more effort and money you have to spend taking care of it, which distracts you from enjoying it. People tend to buy lots of luxury goods, thinking it will give the
m a better lifestyle, but what they really create is a drain for their time and energy as well as their savings.
The best way to get around not owning much is to rent whenever possible. If you enjoy sailing and go ten times a year, don’t buy a boat. If you drive only now and then, rent a car or join a car-share service. When you rent rather than own, you reduce the need for maintenance and the headache of taking care of pricey objects.
It sounds counterintuitive, but scheduling actually simplifies life and allows you to let go of worry. People often ask me if having a full schedule is stressful. In the past I was often preoccupied with trying to make time to see friends or returning phone calls. Now I schedule everything, so that when I’m with a person, I am totally present. I don’t check to see if I need to talk to someone else.
I love being near the water and I love sailing, and that’s why, when I moved out of my loft and needed a place to live, I bought a sailboat and moved onto it full time. (If I didn’t live on it, of course, I would have considered renting one.) Three goals—being near water, sailing, and finding a new home—were accomplished with one act. Similarly, I like being physically fit, but I don’t have a lot of time to exercise, so I ride my bike to work whenever I can, getting my workout on my way to the office. And by pedaling instead of driving, I’m being earth-friendly, another one of my objectives.
Too many people take what’s good about technology—the convenience—and turn it into a form of oppression. For me, the BlackBerry or iPhone is a great simplifier; it allows me to work from anywhere in the world, but I use it with purpose: i.e., I don’t let it control me. I use it when necessary, not through habit.