The best ideas aren’t the simple ones.
On my train journey today, I couldn’t help overhear someone on the seat opposite say to her fellow traveller “well, the best ideas are the simple ones…”
It doesn’t take you long to work out what nonsense this is. Pop your head around your office door and ask your colleagues to write down what they consider to be the five great ideas of all time. You’ll typically get stuff back like “the Jumbo Jet”, “the car”, or “the microchip”.
You can debate whether they’re great — if you have the time — but what is inarguable is that they are not simple. Put it like this, if you limited road usage to those with a thorough understanding of the inner workings of the apparently simple “car”, internal combustion engine and all, your drive to the office would be a dream trip.
Even the paper clip took twenty years to develop and was, so I understand, a solution to a very complex engineering problem — perhaps I’ll fill you in about paper clips on another train ride.
When you think about it, the best ideas aren’t the simple ones, they’re the ones that someone has made easy to understand. If you get something, it usually seems simple in hindsight, but how it is described to you is crucial.
The people who really understand this are the technology start-ups who have just got their seed capital — or not, as the case may be. Here, a team of guys with a great vision for a new product or service are faced with a non-technical banker. They soon find out that how they describe their brilliant idea is, at that precise moment, more important than what their idea is. I can tell you that they don’t convince the money man by leaving things out, not least because investors are thorough. They do it by making sure that what they describe is CLEAR.
And, once our technology start up is truly up and running, clarity is going to be increasingly important. This is because the more that the business grows, more non-technical people will need to know the company story, not less. Those receptionists, finance directors, partners, investors, PR executives and shareholders with science degrees tend to be in the minority.
So, where are some of clarity danger zones in your company?
- Your corporate mission statement — mission statements are fine as a statement of well-meaning intent but they’re pretty useless when it comes to explaining what you do. This is not what they’re for. You need to be able to say what you do in a jargon free sentence. The kind of sentence you could use at the beginning of every ‘general’ PowerPoint presentation to someone who doesn’t know what your business does.
- Your business card — instead of the strap line from your ad campaign or a sentence with the word ‘solutions’ in it, why don’t you spell it out?
- Your reception area — prospective clients and partners don’t intimately know your business the first time they walk in. While they’re waiting they’re a sitting target for your killer message. It’s a golden opportunity.
- Your corporate literature — this would be a better selling tool if it got people understanding. You can’t sell to someone who doesn’t get it.
- Your email signatures — include that clear sentence here. Every little helps.
