#349 How Steve Jobs Kept Things Simple

**David Senra** (0:00)
Okay, so the book that I'm going to talk to you about today is Insanely Simple, The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success, and it was written by Ken Segall. This book is a little different from the books that you and I normally talk about. It is not a biography, but it is a fascinating look into how it was working with Steve Jobs, because Ken Segall was the ad agency creative director of the firm that Steve used when he was at Next, and then when he came back to Apple to lead that turnaround. And so at this point, I've made, I don't know, 10 episodes on Steve Jobs. I've read as many books on him as I can find. And yet there were stories in this book that I have found nowhere else. And it's because Ken worked with Steve intimately for over a decade. Steve had no problem calling Ken at midnight to debate a single word in the ad copy. And so one of the things that Ken noticed that was different from the other clients that he had was that Steve's dedication to simplicity was almost religious in nature. And you would see that religious-like dedication to simplicity throughout the entire way that Steve ran his business, to the way he communicated internally with his employees, to the way he communicated externally to his potential customers, to how he organized his team, to how he built his products. And so Ken noticed that Steve had a tool to do this, and he calls it the simple stick, which is one of my favorite stories. This is the second or third time that I've read the book. And considering I reread my highlights all the time, it's like the 10th time I read the book. And for some reason, I failed to make an episode on it before. So I'm rectifying that mistake here, but the simple stick, the reason I bring that up is because from the very first time I read the book, probably eight years ago, something like that, this idea of the simple stick always stuck in my mind. So the simple stick is just a tool that Steve Jobs used to keep his team from overcomplicating things.
If an idea was not distilled down to its essence, Steve would reject it. If an idea took a turn, when it should have traveled in a straight line, Steve would reject it. So an example that comes up over and over again in the book is if you made two different versions of anything, Steve would hit you with the simple stick until you simplified it down to one. There was an ad made many decades ago for the Macintosh, and it said the tagline on the ad was describing the Macintosh, and it said that it was simply amazing and amazingly simple. Steve wanted Apple to make products that were simply amazing and amazingly simple, and the simple stick was the tool that he used to make that happen. And so the main thesis behind this entire book and why I want to talk to you about it is that people prefer simplicity, customers respond to it, yet humans naturally overcomplicate things. True simplicity that is applied consistently throughout your entire organization is extremely rare. Just think about every single business that you ever interact with. Most of the businesses, the products and services that we use, that we buy would not be described as a product of clear thinking and simplicity. Keep in mind the timeframe that we're talking about. We're talking, and most of the book is about the time where Steve comes back to Apple. Apple is losing money, their product line sucks. They either have to turn it around or die. So I think one of the things that Steve realized, and a lot of other history's greatest entrepreneurs realized is that simplicity actually helps you scale. And so when I was reading this part of the book, I thought about Sam Walton. When I read, I read his autobiography multiple times. The last time I made an episode on it was episode 234, but he has a line in that book where he says, if you don't zero in on bureaucracy every so often, you will naturally build in layers. You never set out to add bureaucracy. You get it, period, without even knowing so. You always have to be looking to eliminate it.
The simple stick was how Steve eliminated at its source. There's a great line in Sam Walton's autobiography that's by a Walmart executive. And it's a story about how Sam is trying to use the simple stick. He's constantly questioning. And let me just read this to you. He says, I'll give you an example that drove Sam crazy until we started doing something about it. When merchandise came into the back of a store, it was supposed to be marked at the right price and marked correctly on the spot. But because it often wasn't getting done properly, we created positions called test scanners. People who go around the stores with handheld scanners, making sure everything is priced correctly. There's another layer right there. And Sam didn't ever visit a store without asking if we really needed these folks.