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Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World Paperback – April 19 2016
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“Whether you run an organization or are simply trying to survive modern life, this book is gold.”—Chris Anderson, curator of TED Talks
Armed with a few simple rules, you can tackle even the most complex of problems.
Drawing on more than a decade of rigorous research, Sull and Eisenhardt 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 Japanese engineers using the foraging rules of slime molds to optimize Tokyo’s rail system. This is the definitive playbook for living simply and efficiently in every sphere of life.
“Simple Rules . . . will help you spot unnecessary complexity, eliminate maddening frustration, make the right decisions faster, and have a whole lot more fun along way.”—Robert I. Sutton, best-selling author of The No Asshole Rule and coauthor of Scaling Up Excellence
“We all deal with complexity now, and this book will show you how you can do more with less.”—Michael J. Mauboussin, head of global financial strategies, Credit Suisse
“Simple Rules explains how we can manage to make meaningful progress in a world that exceeds human understanding . . . This is a harbinger of the information economy to come.” —Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
A WASHINGTON POST LEADERSHIP BOOK TO WATCH FOR 2015 • A BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK MUST-READ BOOK OF THE SUMMER
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Business
- Publication dateApril 19 2016
- Dimensions13.49 x 1.96 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-100544705203
- ISBN-13978-0544705203
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Product description
Review
“One of 12 leadership books to watch for in 2015” -- Washington Post "One of Wall Street's Must-Read Books of the Summer”---Bloomberg Businessweek “Whatever you want in life can be achieved if you break it down into a few basic rules. Well, that’s the theory of these two business experts, and many influential figures think likewise.” --The Times of London “Can’t convey enough how important this is… Simple Rules is the nerd book of the summer.” –Tom Keene, Bloomberg TV "At last, a book offering an ingenious way to fight back against the relentless assault of complexity and its insidious spawning of untold confusions, costs, crashes, and calamities. Simple Rules offers an exciting framework for both understanding complexity and rendering it harmless. Whether you run an organization or are simply trying to survive modern life, this book is gold." —Chris Anderson, TED curator “Simple Rules shows how a handful of thoughtful principles can not only sharpen the quality of your decisions, but also allow you to maintain latitude in your judgments and to see the richness of opportunity. We all deal with complexity now, and this book will show you how you can do more with less.”—Michael J. Mauboussin, Head of Global Financial Strategies, Credit Suisse "Our future will be increasingly complex, from accelerating technological change to global connectivity of federated teams. Simple Rules explains how we can manage to make meaningful progress in a world that exceeds human understanding. At DFJ, we use simple rules, like "invest in unique ideas" to support breakout winners across multiple industries undergoing profound disruption. This is a harbinger of the information economy to come." —Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson “Sull and Eisenhardt have written the definitive playbook injecting sanity, creativity, and productivity into our workplaces and the other spheres of our lives. SIMPLE RULES is brimming with clever and surprising tips, lovely stories, and compelling research that will help you spot unnecessary complexity, eliminate maddening frustration, make the right decisions faster, and have a whole lot more fun along way.“ —Robert I. Sutton, bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule and co-author of Scaling up Excellence —
From the Inside Flap
Simple rules are a hands-on tool to achieve our most pressing personal and professional objectives, from overcoming insomnia to becoming a smarter investor. Simple rules can help solve our most urgent social challenges, from setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve to protecting endangered marine wildlife.
Drawing on more than a decade of research, the authors provide a framework for developing and refining effective rules. They find insights in unexpected places, from how Tina Fey codified her Saturday Night Live experiences into rules for producing 30 Rock ( never tell a crazy person he s crazy ), to burglars rules for selecting targets ( 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 approach to taming complexity."
From the Back Cover
Armed with a few simple rules, you can tackle even the most complex of problems.
Drawing on more than a decade of rigorous research, Sull and Eisenhardt 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 Japanese engineers using the foraging rules of slime molds to optimize Tokyo s rail system. This is the definitive playbook for living simply and efficiently in every sphere of life.
Simple Rules ... will help you spot unnecessary complexity, eliminate maddening frustration, make the right decisions faster, and have a whole lot more fun along way. Robert I. Sutton, best-selling author of The No Asshole Rule and coauthor of Scaling Up Excellence
We all deal with complexity now, and this book will show you how you can do more with less. Michael J. Mauboussin, head of global financial strategies, Credit Suisse
Simple Rules explains how we can manage to make meaningful progress in a world that exceeds human understanding ... This is a harbinger of the information economy to come. Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
A WASHINGTON POST LEADERSHIP BOOK TO WATCH FOR 2015 A BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK MUST-READ BOOK OF THE SUMMER
DONALD SULL is a global expert on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. He is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and formerly a professor at Harvard and the London Business School. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
KATHLEEN M. EISENHARDT is the S.W. Ascherman M.D. Professor of strategy at Stanford s School of Engineering and codirector of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She is the coauthor of the award-winning book Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos and has received numerous awards for her research. She lives in Palo Alto, California."
About the Author
DONALD SULL is a global expert on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. He is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and was formerly a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, where he won three teaching awards. He earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate from Harvard University. He has published three award-winning books, ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles, and over one hundred case studies, articles, and book chapters on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. The Economist identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century and Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus.
KATHLEEN M. EISENHARDT is the S. W. Ascherman Professor of Strategy at Stanford, a highly cited author, and the co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Her research focuses on strategy, strategic decision making, and organizational design in highly uncertain markets. She is the coauthor of Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, winner of the George R. Terry Book Award. A fellow of the World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative, she is also the first author featured in Harvard Business Review’s On Point collections. She holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering, an M.S. in computer science, and a Ph.D. from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Business; Reprint edition (April 19 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544705203
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544705203
- Item weight : 227 g
- Dimensions : 13.49 x 1.96 x 20.32 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #680,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #366 in Financial Economic Statistics
- #368 in Economic Statistics (Books)
- #452 in Econometrics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Don Sull teaches strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was formerly a Professor at London Business School and Harvard University, where he earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. The Economist and Fortune have identified him among the next generation of management gurus. Prior to academia, Sull worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a management-investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He discovered the power of simple rules when working as an undersized bouncer in a biker bar.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt is the S.W. Ascherman M.D. Professor at Stanford, highly-cited author, and Co-Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Her new book (w/MIT's Don Sull) is "Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World". It explores how and why simplicity tames complexity in life, business, and nature. She is also co-author (w/Shona Brown) of "Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos", winner of the George R. Terry Award and an Amazon Top 10 Business and Investing book.
Kathleen's research usually begins with a dilemma - something that stymies lots of people and piques her curiosity. In "Simple Rules", that puzzle was coping with the mind-numbing proliferation of information and choices that characterizes everyday life. She then attacks these dilemmas with her outstanding doctoral students and colleagues, and clarifies unexpected solutions for academic, business, and general readers.
Kathleen has been a Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos) and Clinton Global Initiative. She has won numerous awards including the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, ASQ Scholarly Contribution Award, and Schendel Best Paper prize, has four honorary degrees, and has given Oxford's Clarendon Lectures. A renowned scholar, she was recently named the most cited research author in strategy and organization studies during the past 25 years. Kathleen lives in Palo Alto, California.
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Whether you picked up this book for business or self-help is irrelevant.The concepts explained in this book are applicable to every aspect of your life. I can only speak for myself, so here's what I gleaned from the book: When to use simple rules and when to use something more detailed? Simple rules are great when flexibility is important whereas detailed rules are great when consistency is important.
The book goes on to detail different types of simple rules that are benefical under different circumstances, and how to go about crafting them for your individual needs and improving them over time.
The book also plays the devil's advocate to make a case for when to let go of your simple rules all together for a brand new set of simple rules or detailed ones.
At the end of the day, the question I ask myself AFTER reading every (non-foction) book is: what did I learn from this and how can I apply this EASILY? The book is short and succinct, so distilling what you learnt from it and how you can apply it is easy. So for me it gets a very hgih mark there.
The question you should be asking BEFORE reading this is: do I want more simplcity in my life, but didn't know how to get there? For me the answer was yes. The book certainly promises that, and I could sense the clarity with the few pages I read in the book preview. If this sounds like you then you should probably buy this book, and go through it with a highlighter. Re-read it again after the fact.
But I had a lot of aha moments reading the book and my musings lead me to solve several personal strategy issues that have been perplexing me. I have successfully developed some simple and unanticipated screening criteria and in other instances focused lists of "changing the things I can can change" Thereby gaining a manner of control over the things I cannot change. Great book
Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt explain the power of simple rules in terms of several substantial benefits. Here are five.
1. They save resources, especially time and energy.
2. They can be adjusted the given circumstances.
3. They help to eliminate confusion and consequent hesitation.
4. They provide a framework within which to improvise.
5. They allow flexible collaboration, especially under duress.
I cannot recall a prior time that was more complicated and more stressful than it is today for people to meet all manner of obligations in all areas of their lives. Moreover, on average, each of us receives about 8,500 "messages" a day that compete for our attention. Sull and Eisenhardt cite Warren Weaver whose pioneer research in the field of complexity (much of it conducted at the Rockefeller Foundation) reveals several valuable insights. Sixty years ago, "Weaver argued that simple and uncertain problems have largely been solved, and that the greatest challenges of the future would be problems of complexity. He was right." I presume to add, in this context, that one of the greatest challenges now is to simplify the process by which to solve complex problems. This is what Jon Katzenbach has in mind when suggesting the most difficult challenges for change agents is to change how they think about change.
These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Sull and Eisenhardt's coverage:
o The Discovery of Complexity (Pages 7-12)
o Simple Rules for a Complex World (12-17)
o Simple Rules Produce Better Decisions (32-38)
o Boundary Rules (50-57)
o Stopping Rules (62-70)
o How-To Rules (74-82)
Example How to Thrive in a Complex World
o Natural Selection (99-102)
o Distilling Scientific Knowledge (110-113)
o Studying Simple Rules in Action (121-124)
o Identify a Bottleneck (130-137)
o Craft the Simple Rules (137-144)
o Crafting Simple Rules That Work for You (151-155)
o Rules to Win Friends and Influence People (166-169)
Comment: If you are inauthentic, forget it. Phonies have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
o Crafting Better Simple Rules (173-180)
o How Simple Rules Improve (180-186)
o Changing the Vision, Changing the Rules (205-209)
o Changing the Bottlenecks, Rewriting the Rules (213-221)
o Overcoming the Barriers to Simplicity (224-227)
Those who read this book with appropriate care will soon realize that Sull and Eisenhardt are offering simple rules on how to formulate and then apply the simple rules needed to thrive in a complex world. I agree with them: "Fighting complexity is an ongoing battle that can wear us down. Disheartened, people tolerate complicated solutions that don't work, or cling to overly simplistic narratives ("Climate change is a myth," for example, or "Globalization is bad") that deny the interdependencies characterizing modern life. Simple rules can be a powerful weapon in this fight."
Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations need to follow Einstein`s advice and make everything as simple as possible but no simpler. To achieve that worthy objective, organizations will need effective leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt wrote this book to open their eyes "to the myriad opportunities they have to tackle complexity with simplicity, and to provide concrete guidance on how to seize these opportunities." Almost all of the information, insights, and counsel they need are provided in this volume. Bravo!
The book is badly organized. Full of anecdotic evidence ; not backed by science. Too much personal stories, not enough theory. Not any step by step to create your own rules...


