Keeping it Simple

"keeping it simple is well... simpler". This is a sentence from a conversation I had with a management consultant we hired. The guy was CEO of two companies and one of the things he strongly believes in is trying to stick to well established management methods and organizational structures. More specifically, this point was raised with regards to three subjects. The responsibility distribution between the executives, the way to measure employee performance and over specialization in employee roles but I guess the same ideas can apply to more areas.

Just to bring the the idea down to earth, here is an example of viable complicated solutions:

1. Executives with the following responsibilities: CEO, VP New Business, VP Existing Business, VP Product, VP R&D.
2. Employees that have the following titles: Sales Manager - new accounts (hunter), Sales Manager - existing accounts (farmer), Account manager (operations), project manager, customer support, Integration engineer.
3. Setting performance indicators to every employee and using it as a the main criteria to evaluate employees

And here are the corresponding simple solutions:

1. Executive with the following responsibilities: CEO, VP Marketing and Product, VP Sales, VP R&D
2. Employees have the following titles: Sales Manager, Project management and support
3. Evaluating employees in more standard ways

The benefit of making things simpler is obvious, there is less overhead, it's easier to explain and communicate both internally and externally and it's much more scalable. Guy Kawasaki, once said in one of his entrepreneurship sessions: "be innovative about the right things" meaning - your technology and product and not your organizational structure and business models.

As for me, I believe that this approach might fit some cases while in other cases, there might be good reasons to create more complicated solutions. However, the "cost" of not keeping it simple should be considered in the discussion.