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    Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
    Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
    Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
    Audiobook7 hours

    Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

    Written by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

    Narrated by Jeff Cummings

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    How simplicity trumps complexity in nature, business, and life.

    We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: by developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

    Simple rules are a hands-on tool to achieve some of our most pressing personal and professional objectives, from overcoming insomnia to becoming a better manager or a smarter investor. Simple rules can help solve some of our most urgent social challenges from setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve to protecting endangered marine wildlife along California’s coast.

    Drawing on more than a decade of rigorous research, the authors 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 burglars’ rules to choose a house to rob (“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 way to tame complexity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 21, 2015
    ISBN9781491590362
    Author

    Donald Sull

    Donald Sull is a professor of strategy and the faculty director of executive education at the London Business School. He received his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees from Harvard University, where he taught entrepreneurship. Prior to his academic career, professor Sull worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company and as a management investor with a leveraged buyout firm. He blogs for the Financial Times (www.blogs.ft.com/donsullblog).

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    Reviews for Simple Rules

    3.5/5

    41 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book givea various examples to reinforce the idea that simple wins. One of the best concepts, truly as close as you can get to magic
    • 5/5
      Simple Rules, how to thrive in a complex world by Donald Skull and Kathleen Eisenhardt. Simple rules are shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information. A real world application of this is the battle field and emergency room triage systems. An ER has simple rules of thumb which prioritize which patients are seen before other clients no matter what order they arrive. This allows the late arriving heart attack victim to be seen before the early arriving broken finger.The authors contend that simple rules have 3 features. They are few in number, they are applied to a single well defined problem, and they give concrete guidance without being overly limiting. Simple rules do not apply to all situations. There are times when detailed rules are needed, such as when precision and repeatability are needed such as preflight checklist where deviation from an accepted standard can cause trouble. Simple rules are effective when they facilitate 3 things, they allow for flexibility, when the cause and effect of actions are not well understood ,and when no single individual has all the needed information to make a decision. It takes the authors 46 pages to make their basic argument against complex rules in favor of simple ones. The remaining pages are spent applying them to various business and personal situations. The book is well written and has insightful examples. I would recommend this book for anyone trying to simplify their life, and trying to make decisions. One direct consequence of apply the concepts is that I was able to simplify my clothes buying decisions. I know to work. I will wear a golf shirt jeans to work, except when I need to go a formal event then I will wear a business suit.