My good friend and co-collaborator Leif Hansen, passed along an article from the Harvard Business Review on 37signals.com (who created the award-winning app Highrise, which we use religiously).
Here’s the gist of the article, quoting founders Jason Fried and his colleague David Heinemeier Hansson:
“No, less is less—because more is not better! Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. Our goal is to do less, to build half a product rather than a half-assed product. So we say ‘no’ to almost everything. If you include every decent idea that comes along, you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you really want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.”
The article doesn’t specify which of them said that glorious quote, but it doesn’t matter, there’s a whole lotta truth in it.
I wrote about how Productivity Contributes to Global Warming and Debt, and here’s a super-successful company, one for which we’re raving fans, who shows you how to be sustainably successful by doing less. Much less.
Are you able to resist the urge to do more, be more? Can you be less than all you can be, and be happier as a result? Tell us about your next project/product/offering your business is making- do you have an idea of how you can make it less, and thus make it more successful?
2 Responses
Tell us about your next project/product/offering your business is making- do you have an idea of how you can make it less, and thus make it more successful?
Well, I think I did this without consciously knowing about this perspective when I created the Seasoned Coaches Development Program (http://www.lifeonpurpose.com/scdp). While Life On Purpose Institute has been focused over the past 10 in training new people just coming into the coaching profession, I’ve thought for sometime that as the coaching profession grows it would be time to offer a scaled down, concentrated training for experienced coaches.
So, I’ve combined the pre-requisite of our Coaches Development Program in with this training while removing parts that aren’t needed for an experienced coach — basic coaching skills they’ve already learned and have been applying and a lot of the basic marketing components (but not all of them).
So, with this customized ‘less is less’ program, experienced coaches will be able to add a powerful new form of coaching to their practice in about 4 months rather than the 8 months of our other program.
I’m looking forward to working with this new group of people.
BRAD
I agree with this. I’ve test driven countless software programs and most of them are poorly designed, in that they didn’t think through what they really needed to have and get rid of the rest. The key point, that Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) writes about is that good design is when you think through the user’s problem and make some decisions for them. You don’t need to give them every widget and option – that just shows that you didn’t spend the time and have the leadership, like you are saying, to decide what is really needed.
Reading this makes me think of a site I am in the process of redesigning, and I think I’ve gotten into the “More is more” mindset without realizing it. I am going to go revisit my plan and see what is really the best I could offer and what is just cruft.