What is simplifying complicated work?

When Nokia President Ollila first came to power, Nokia not only produced mobile communication equipment, but also produced televisions, tires, monitors and cables. It is much more complete than it is now. The benefits of tires and TV are very good. The life of Nokia people was very good at that time.

After Ollila took office, he was optimistic about the infinite future of mobile communication, so he cut off the production departments of TV sets and other household appliances and sold them decisively to German manufacturers, leaving only the production departments related to communication such as mobile communication systems, mobile phones and computer monitors.

He is convinced that the company's complicated business is only bad for the company. While many companies are pursuing "big and complete", Ollila has started to do "subtraction" and embarked on the road of "less but better". Ollila's reform strategy was later praised as "Ollila phenomenon" by the business community.

Under the leadership of Ollila, Nokia's stock has increased thousands of times in a few years. The "Ollila phenomenon" has made Nokia, a small Finnish company, a leader in the global mobile phone industry today, accounting for 32% of the global mobile phone market, and it is known as "Nokia for three people". If Ollila hadn't adhered to the "subtraction principle", it would be difficult to have the glory of Nokia today.

The main reason why people are often too busy and inefficient is to complicate simple things. Whether in enterprise management or in doing things, simplicity has always been the basic principle of maintaining high efficiency.

There is a Fortune 500 company. When the recruitment supervisor interviewed, the examiner asked such a question: "How much is 10 minus 1?"

The first candidate said smartly, "9 is consumption, 12 is management, and 15 is trade."

The second candidate leaned against the examiner's ear and said, "It is what you think it is."

The third candidate replied hesitantly, "it's equal to 9", and later added, "It's silly not to speak out loud, because I'm afraid others will think I have a low IQ."

As a result, the third candidate was accepted, and the examiner said, "Our aim is not to complicate simple problems, especially for managers, who must have simple management concepts."

10- 1=9, very simple question. But we often rack our brains to give it various meanings for granted, but we ignore its original meaning.

A person's words and deeds can reveal his true character. From the words and deeds of the second candidate, we can see that he is a shrewd and calculating person. Such a shrewd man always thinks things very complicated and treats people in a roundabout way, for fear that others will see his intentions. Such people are not conducive to effective communication and the healthy development of the whole enterprise. Pursuing efficiency is the foundation of an enterprise, and simple and direct management is the basis for achieving high efficiency. Therefore, the examiner finally chose the third candidate.

McKinsey has given the business community an efficient working method: "30-second elevator theory". Mckinsey's consulting services for corporate clients are very expensive because they often provide strategic services. Mckinsey asked the staff, "If you meet a customer's CEO in the elevator, the elevator takes only 30 seconds to get to the first floor, and the CEO will ask," Xiao Li, have you got the result of the consulting plan you are giving us now? At this time, can you tell him the result in 30 seconds, tell him one, two, three, or get to the point right away? "

Mckinsey had a lesson before: they once consulted an important big customer and met the customer's chairman in the elevator at the end of the consultation. The chairman asked the person in charge of the project: can you tell me about the current results? The project leader was unprepared for this. Even if he was prepared, he never thought of making the answer clear in 30 seconds. Because of this incident, McKinsey finally lost this important customer.

Mckinsey requires employees to express the results clearly in the shortest time, that is, to go straight to the subject and the results. This is the "30-second elevator theory" or "elevator speech" widely circulated in today's business circles.

Simplifying complex problems can speed up the pace and progress of your work and help you grasp the key points of things, thus greatly improving your work efficiency.

·C(Donald C, an American management scientist, put forward three principles to improve efficiency in his masterpiece "Improving Production Efficiency", that is, when you deal with any job, you must ask yourself: Can you cancel it? Can it be merged with other jobs? Can you change it to something simpler? These three principles require you to simplify complex problems.

Carly fiorina, a former CEO of Lucent Technologies, is a real struggler. She improved her life year after year, infecting her customers and colleagues with her enthusiasm.

Carly fiorina gave a speech at the new york Investor Conference when Lucent Technology Company was preparing to go public. Years later, serious investment experts still remember her concise and infectious speech. In her speech, she effectively used figures, saying that the communication equipment market has a growth potential of 654.38+000 billion US dollars waiting for Lucent. This number is so huge that she thinks it makes the communication equipment network more attractive than the Internet. The charm of her speech reached its climax at last-at this time, she put aside everything and infected people only with her confidence. The last thing she said was, "Now look at us!" It is this extremely concise sentence that makes most investors make up their minds.

Why is Fiorina's writing so charming?

It turns out that Carly Fiorina liked a young professor's class best when she was in college. This course requires him to read 100 pages of medieval religious works every week, and then summarize these contents in two pages. This requires all the water in the contents to be removed and concentrated to the essence. This skill of refinement and concentration plays a key role in Carly Fiorina's work style. It is this outstanding talent and concise language style that makes her the most famous slogan designer and the most influential and attractive company president of American enterprises.

Simplicity is a distinctive style of exploring problems and an ability to solve problems in depth. It is a kind of ability to distinguish "important affairs" from "urgent affairs", and it is a kind of ability that enables you to find key information from the complicated realistic information around you, and quickly understand and solve it.

The streamlining principle of employee process optimization in PepsiCo is based on Tracy's Law. "Tracy's Law" means: "The difficulty of any job is proportional to the square of the number of execution steps: for example, if there are three execution steps to complete a job, the difficulty of the job is 9, and if there are five steps to complete another job, the difficulty of the job is 25, so try to simplify the workflow."

PepsiCo has many employees who support Tracy's Law, and they all "do what they can" regardless of their departmental workflow or personal workflow. One of the hobbies of many employees is to analyze the network diagram of workflow. Every time a redundant link is removed, there is less possibility of work delay, which means a lot of time is saved. Some employees can get rid of 70 redundant work links in two years, which can save more than 3,000 hours, that is, 120 days.

Simplicity is the art of simplifying complexity. It gives us the power to handle affairs correctly and work intelligently. Simplicity is a power to do less secondary things, and it is also a power to do more important things.

Jack Welch said: "There is no absolute truth and management secret ... I always believe in the simplest and most direct method."

The simplification and organization of work have saved people more time. Simplicity is the key to success. If you want to do things efficiently, you must adopt the most direct and simple method, and you can't get into a complicated quagmire.

Because complexity is an obstacle to self-setting, it is impossible to achieve the best results. Therefore, to do things efficiently, we must boldly check the obstacles that hinder us and deal with the problems simply, simply and directly.

The principle of straight-line propagation of light tells us that in a uniform medium, light travels along a straight line. If you encounter obstacles in the process of propagation, diffraction will occur, away from straight-line propagation. At this time, light is scattered, and we can't feel its heat.

The way we do things, just like the propagation of light, has the same law: only when there is no obstacle in the middle can we travel in a straight line, thus effectively exerting heat. Therefore, in our life and work, if we want to do things efficiently, we must follow the law of simplification, that is, it should be as simple and direct as the linear propagation of light.