Simple

Conquering the Crisis of Complexity

By: Alan Siegel, Irene Etzkorn

Narrated by: Fleet Cooper

For decades, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have championed simplicity as a competitive advantage and a consumer right. Consulting with businesses and organizations around the world to streamline products, services, processes and communications, they have achieved dramatic results.

In Simple, the culmination of their work together, Siegel and Etzkorn show us how having empathy, striving for clarity, and distilling your message can reduce the distance between company and customer, hospital and patient, government and citizen-and increase your bottom line.

Examining the best and worst practices of an array of organizations big and small-including the IRS, Google, Philips, Trader Joe's, Chubb Insurance, and ING Direct, and many more-Siegel and Etzkorn recast simplicity as a mindset, a design aesthetic, and a writing technique.

In these illuminating pages you will discover, among other things:

• Why the Flip camera became roadkill in the wake of the iPhone
• What SIMPLE idea allowed the Cleveland Clinic to improve care and increase revenue
• How OXO designed a measuring cup that sold a million units in its first 18 months on the market
• Where Target got the idea for their "ClearRX" prescription system
• How New York City simplified its unwieldy bureaucracy with three simple numbers

By exposing the overly complex things we encounter every day, SIMPLE reveals the reasons we allow confusion to persist, inspires us to seek clarity, and explores how social media is empowering consumers to demand simplicity.

The next big idea in business is Simple.

Disappointing

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

I can't think of a particular audience who would enjoy this book. One of the problems was that it was scattered and unfocused and pardon my pun, simplistic.It seems like there are the beginnings of two or three good books contained in the ideas of this book. However, the authors need to decide to focus and develop these.

Would you ever listen to anything by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn again?

Probably not, there really wasn't a whole lot of meaningful content in this book, it seemed like the authors were just trying to capitalize on a fad.

What didn’t you like about Fleet Cooper’s performance?

He did this weird thing whenever he was quoting another person. He would take on this creepy voice almost like Jack Donaughy's nemesis in 30 rock.

What character would you cut from Simple?

I would probably start with the narrator.

Any additional comments?

Yes, save your credit and skip this one. There's a ton of great information on simplicity on the web. This book has neither depth nor breath and therefore offers nothing above and beyond what you can find with a simple Google search.