Simple Rules

How to Thrive in a Complex World

By: Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

How simplicity trumps complexity in nature, business, and life.

We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: by developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

Simple rules are a hands-on tool to achieve some of our most pressing personal and professional objectives, from overcoming insomnia to becoming a better manager or a smarter investor. Simple rules can help solve some of our most urgent social challenges, from setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve to protecting endangered marine wildlife along California's coast.

Drawing on more than a decade of rigorous research, the authors provide a clear framework for developing effective rules and making them better over time. They find insights in unexpected places, from the way Tina Fey codified her experience working at Saturday Night Live into rules for producing 30 Rock (rule five: never tell a crazy person he's crazy) to burglars' rules to choose a house to rob ("avoid houses with a car parked outside") to Japanese engineers using the foraging rules of slime molds to optimize Tokyo's rail system.

Whether you're struggling with information overload, pursuing opportunities with limited resources, or just trying to change your bad habits, Simple Rules provides a powerful way to tame complexity.

©2015 Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Good but

This book gave plenty of examples but at the end of the day it was really too complicated to come up with simple rules. It really wasn't a simple rule to creating some simple rules

Good But Formulaic

It followed the very benign (and occasionally dull) path of most business texts, although the imported knowledge was very useful. It's reminiscent of the initially novel but eventually annoying need to crack the walnut shell to get at the food. It's rewarding but not practical for continuous consumption.

Couldn't keep my attention.

the book seemed redundant and slow. finished it but with a bit of effort. Some of the concepts were interesting - started counting how many times the title was used..... :-(

It could've been much shorter

Everything is repeated many many times. It gets tiring. Aside from that, you can learn many things from this book.

It's always good to be reminded that simple is key

I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from this book. The information was helpful and it was presented in an interesting way.

So useful and entertaining!!

I really enjoyed listening to this book. I learned a lot what was being taught. So much of life makes more sense now! Awesome

Good information, but...

Would rather have read an article, not a full length book. Listening to this made me feel like I was in the back of an overly warm classroom, interested, but wishing the professor would wrap it up.

Simple Rules Create Results

The digital workplace promised us a simple and productive work life. It delivered on neither promise. With computers giving us more and more information -- along with more powerful ways to analyze it -- work-related decisions have not gotten simpler, but more complex. Enter Simple Rules, commonsense guidelines to developing simple "rules of thumb" that can be just as effective, if not more effective, than complex algorithms.

This book walks the reader through the different types of decisions that need to be made in various situations and shows how to develop the type of simple rules that can help make quick and effective decisions. A relatively quick read, the book is as enjoyable as it is applicable.

If you are in any sort of leadership position or plan to be, read this book

In the middle of this book I was actually asked to do a presentation and I've decided to alter my original plans to focus on this concept. Hopefully we can create simple workflows at my company. We definitely suffer from guideline bloat. I also love the myriad of examples from personal rules to when complexity actually is a good thing and everything in between.

Simple and profound

Readability and accessibility belies the hard science behind this timely and revelatory book. Ironically, hidden in the analysis of simple rules are some neat simple rules like the ones behind depression, dieting, and understanding popular TV shows.