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9+ Works 272 Membros 6 Críticas

About the Author

Donald N. Sull is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management area at Harvard Business School.

Includes the name: Donald Sull

Obras por Donald N. Sull

Associated Works

Harvard Business Review on Advances in Strategy (2002) — Contribuidor — 53 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Locais de residência
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
London, England, UK

Membros

Críticas

I enjoyed Simple Rules. Some of the examples were useful. A Simple Rule I already follow is "Don't keep reading if it seems to be repeating itself". This book suffered from that problem, so I skimmed the second half and that's that.
 
Assinalado
jbaty | 5 outras críticas | Dec 29, 2023 |
This book was probably better as a seminar. The content is 5 star, but the book itself feels more like 2-3. Sull and Eisenhardt discuss the value of simple rules, how to define them, and how to refine them over time. The process is heavily illustrated with examples. Examples are useful, but these end up taking center stage so that the process itself feels almost like a footnote to the stories. I do not blame the authors for this. There is not a good publication vehicle for useful, straightforward processes which do not need a whole book's worth of explanation. Plus, it was still a quick read overall, so the padding is easy to forgive. If you focus on the core process, the ideas are excellent and, in my opinion, critical for anyone who is in the role of crafting behavioral rules.

Simple rules are easy to remember and apply, narrow enough to provide concrete guidance, and flexible enough to allow individual judgment. Simple rules are tailored -- to a situation, its bottlenecks, and the preferences of the users. They can be used by individuals or by groups. Simple rules derived in one context will rarely translate exactly to another.

They differ from checklists. Like simple rules, checklists are concrete and easy to follow. However, checklists are meant to decrease flexibility and are useful when consistency is what matters most. For example, as Atul Gawande notes in The Checklist Manifesto, checklists are good for situations where there is a fixed set of best practices that is easy to execute but hard to remember, such as flight takeoff processes and for surgical preparation.

By contrast, simple rules are good for complex situations. Complexity arises when a system has many parts that interact in hard to predict ways. It may seem that complex problems call for complex solutions. Complex solutions fail in a couple ways. They are hard to use, which means that often they will not be used. Complex solutions often end up conflating signal and noise. Even in complex systems, there are generally a small number of dominant factors which have the greatest impact on outcomes. Simple rules can help focus attention on those. Simple rules are less prescriptive than complicated processes. A good example is Michael Pollan's simple rules for eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.". It's concrete and tailored to a particular situation, but it is flexible enough to allow personal preferences and situational details to shape individual choices.

Simple rules help promote alignment in groups. This shows up in the behavior of animals that live in large groups, like flocks of birds or colonies of bees or ants. The behavior of these animals, such as flocking behavior of birds, looks like it requires centralized planning and direction, but actually arises from each individual acting on the same set of simple rules. The same goes for humans. As the authors say, "Simple rules impose a minimal level of coordination, while leaving ample room for individuals to pursue their own objectives."

Simple rules can be categorized. Decision rules help us decide what to do. Boundary rules help us determine what is in or out, whether to say yes or no. Prioritizing rules help rank or categorize options to determine how to allocate limited resources. Medical triage rules are a type of prioritizing rule. Stopping rules help us decide when to stop pursuing an option or to reverse a decision. This might include when to make a decision when choices are presented sequentially or when to undo a decision such as selling a stock.

Other rules help us do things better. Process rules provide guidance for tasks that can benefit from having some structure but which are not amenable to rigid checklists. How-to rules are familiar to most of us. These rules help us learn or remember how to do something. Coordination rules help get something done when there are multiple actors involved. The rules of the road are coordination rules which allow many cars to drive on the road without constantly having to negotiate interactions. Timing rules help us figure out when to do things, such as the rhythm of a morning routine or sequencing rules that indicate that we should do X when Y happens.

Simple rules have many sources. Often, they evolve naturally from repeated experience. In the case of the behavior of bugs and birds, this is literally biological evolution. In humans, these rules often are encoded in individual intuitions or group norms. As Sull and Eistenhardt note, "While evolved rules benefit from legitimacy and relevance, they also have weaknesses. Evolved rules are often implicit and deeply entrenched, making it difficult to examine them critically when circumstances change, or abandon them when they become dysfunctional. Entrenched rules may prevent people from imagining alternative ways of being."

Simple rules can also be derived from the experience of others. This can be the experience drawn from similar situations, such as learning from experts in a field. Learning from the experience of others can also take the form of applying analogies from other domains. A particular type of learning from the experience of others is deriving rules from scientific evidence. These sorts of rules show up, for example, in the rules that doctors use to diagnose diseases.

Sometimes, simple rules are used to provide a framework for making decisions when people disagree. In these cases, the rules may be negotiated rather than derived from experiences or knowledge. Generally, negotiated rules are most effective when they are derived independent of particular decisions to be made. If everyone agrees up front on what rules will be used to make decisions, then there will be less disagreement when applying those rules to specific instances. Critical in this is that the rules themselves are developed with the input of relevant stakeholders.

The next part of the book lays out a process for crafting simple rules.
1. Figure out what will move the needles.
2. Choose a bottleneck.
3. Craft the rules.

In complex processes there are many candidates for simple rules. However, it is only worth applying them in the areas where it will make a real difference. If, for example, you have decided that the most important thing standing between you and greater happiness is improving your health, then it is probably most useful for you to focus on simple rules about your health and not, say, your relationships. The second step helps you figure out what will make the most impact within that area. Say, for example, that you already exercise regularly but tend to snack in the afternoon. Those snacks are likely to be a bottleneck that is worth focusing on. These first two steps are mostly about observation and data collection.

For the third step, it is critical to make sure that the right people are involved in forming the rules. Rules determined from on-high are generally not effective. Instead, simple rules are most effective when the people who will use them are involved in the design. Also, it is important to test and iterate on the rules. Most of the time, the first cut will have too many rules or rules that do not actually move the needle identified in the first step. It is also important to make sure the rules are concrete and easy to apply. Otherwise, they risk turning into platitudes. "Don't interrupt" is a better simple rule than "Create a respectful environment in meetings".

Rules need to be improved over time, as you learn more and as situations change. We improve rules by taking time to reflect on what works and what doesn't work. Often time, this reflection does not need to be explicitly focused on improving the rules. Just creating the time and space for reflection is often enough to cause improvement over time. We can also improve our rules by doing related by different activities. This cross pollination can help bring a fresh perspective to old activities and rules. Pursuing various ways to learn can also help us improve them more quickly. This might look like including formalized education on a topic with pursuing different types of experience.

Sometimes, it is not enough to incrementally improve rules. When the context changes dramatically enough, then it may be time to reset the rules completely. When this happens, mindlessly sticking to the old rules can be worse than having no rules at all because people. This chapter was short on substance, but one useful observation the authors made is that once you decide to change the rules, it is generally better to change them all at once rather than to try to introduce them slowly. That generally ends up getting you in a situation where you have two competing sets of rules which generally ends up confusing.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
eri_kars | 5 outras críticas | Jul 10, 2022 |
Maybe I’m just used to hearing about this kind of stuff, but I feel like this didn’t really say anything new or profound. I kept hanging with it to see if it would get better, but was a little disappointed. The gist is exactly the title - have simple rules. Use rules to make decisions, and only have a few of them. The book went through a lot of examples and stories so if you’re into that kind of stuff maybe you’d enjoy it more than me. Loved the concept, just felt like it could have been a blog post instead of a whole book… (mais)
 
Assinalado
britt_joiner | 5 outras críticas | Dec 4, 2021 |
The message--find simple rules that work for you and break through your bottlenecks. I didn't find anything new here--but it was a good reminder of things I already know.

Like my rule about reading--read every day and read in the morning. That is how I'm able to churn through so many books.

And it reminded me of one I've used in the past to lose weight. Forget complicated diets. I lose weight when I weigh myself every day and then try to lose a half pound each day. If I weigh myself, and I've gained weight--add more attention.

And Moneyball. Jeez--if I read one more business book that talks about Moneyball!!! But still a fine book.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
auldhouse | 5 outras críticas | Sep 30, 2021 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
9
Also by
1
Membros
272
Popularidade
#85,118
Avaliação
½ 3.3
Críticas
6
ISBN
23
Línguas
3

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