Why Simple Wins

Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters

By: Lisa Bodell

Narrated by: Steven Menasche

Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day.

Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognize which activities are time-sucks and which create lasting value.

Lisa Bodell's simplification method has several unique principles:

• Simplification is a skill that's available to us all, yet very few leaders use it.
• Simplification is the right thing to do - for our customers, for our company, and for each other. Operating with simplification as our core business model will make it easier to be respectful of each other's time.
• Simplification drives culture, and culture in turn drives employee engagement, customer relations, and overall productivity.

This book is inspired by Bodell's passion for eliminating barriers to innovation and productivity. In it, she explains why change and innovation are so hard to achieve - and it's not what you might expect. The reality is this: we spend our days drowning in mundane tasks like meetings, emails, and reports. These are often self-created complexities that prevent us from getting to the meaningful work that truly matters.

Using simple stories and techniques, Why Simple Wins shows that by using simplicity as an operating principle, we can eliminate the busy work that puts a chokehold on us every day, and instead spend time on the work that we value.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2016 Lisa Bodell (P)2016 Gildan Media, LLC

good story useful tools

albeit without concise direction on how to use unless you go back and listen to the book with the PDF in hand. tweaked my interest into her other tool offerings but unfortunately the process to obtain is less than simple so sadly future think doesn't eat its own dog food.

Repetitive and boring. Could have been half the number of pages.

The point is made in the first 10 mins. Feels overwritten. Could have been more concise.

Missing the writer

This might sound a bit cranky but I do miss the fact that it's not the writer reading and speaking. The voice is not bad but it doesn't feel as powerful or true when it's not read by the writer. Especially this type of books.

Stunningly complex solutions to complexity

Lisa Bodell prescribes a spectacularly complex set of procedures in the name of helping your business simplify. The complication and specificity are truly stunning—down to telling readers exactly how many minutes to spend thinking about certain questions or performing certain steps in the labyrinth of procedures she gives. A much more helpful and impactful approach would be to state each principle and then show just enough diverse examples so that readers can go off and generalize the principle to all aspects of their lives. This approach is used extremely effectively by Stephen Covey and Simon Sinek.

In addition, the reader’s performance is the worst I have heard on Audible, save for Christopher Hitchens’ mumbling in his own books. The reader’s constant, exaggerated changes in intonation are at best bizarre, at worst extremely distracting to the listener.

Overall, a huge letdown of a book, especially one written about such an important topic in today’s world.