Simple Rules Book Summary - Simple Rules Book explained in key points

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Simple Rules summary

Name: Simple Rules
Rating: 4.2 (36 reviews)
Author: Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt

How to Thrive in a Complex World

4.2 (36 ratings)

18 mins

Topics

Effectiveness Coaching Routines & Habits Goals Success

Table of Contents

Simple Rules
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Achieve more with just a few Simple Rules.

If you want to change your life or get tighter buns, there’s a world of guidebooks and expert websites out there to help you. Just plop yourself down with a nice cup of coffee and some cookies and start reading. A few hundred pages in, it’s dark outside, you’ve forgotten half the tips you’ve read and you’re no closer to a fun new life or rock-hard glutes.

Why? Well, here’s the thing about rules: If there are more rules than you can comfortably memorize, you might as well forget all of them! All they’ll exercise is your memory – and there are more rewarding ways to do that.

Also, good rules are simple. They allow you to focus on what really matters and react flexibly to new situations. Research shows that the most successful companies in the New Economy prefer a small set of simple in-house rules to more elaborate systems.

So how can you work out the right Simple Rules for your specific situation?

Read on to find out

how to draft your own Simple Rules and stick to them;
why it can be a good idea to always paint the same subject; and
why you’re not getting any thinner.

The world is overwhelmingly complex – but Simple Rules will help us cope.

Take a moment to imagine you’re a medical doctor at an army hospital. Several badly wounded patients come in, and you’re faced with the task of deciding whom to treat first. What do you do? Luckily for you, there are a handful of reliable rules to follow that’ll make things simpler.

Simple Rules are clear guidelines for well-defined activities or situations. Their purpose? To help you make good choices when things start to get convoluted.

Simple Rules reduce the factors you have to consider in a situation by highlighting the crucial, thus preventing you from ruminating over trivial details. This enables you to make good choices, and fast – something very useful in the case of an army hospital. How do you sort out what’s crucial in this hypothetical scenario?

Check your patients’ vital signs, such as their pulse, to estimate the severity of their condition. This takes less than a minute per patient. Those with the most alarming vital signs have to be treated first – unless they’re beyond hope, in which case you’d better focus on saving someone else’s life. Already this basic triage has lifted you clear of the pressing dilemma of what to do.

As one of the only tools that help us deal with complexity, we need Simple Rules more than ever. Our world is far from straightforward. Firstly, more and more things are interconnected – from our technological devices at home to markets around the globe. Moreover, our own rules and regulations have gotten so intricate that it’s hard to stay on top of things.

Just take the US tax code: it’s 3.8 million words long. To put that into context, that’s seven times longer than War and Peace! The code is so complicated that the government employs 1.2 million tax preparers just to cope. Unsurprisingly, the US tax code overwhelms even the experts: On average, every third piece of advice by an IRS expert is wrong.

In such a labyrinthine world, mistakes seem unavoidable. But with Simple Rules, you can better your chances of making your way through treacherously tangled situations. Find out more in the coming blinks.

Simple Rules are easy to follow, and leave you room to choose.

Say you want to lose some weight, and decide to do a little internet research. There’s a huge variety of popular diet programs to choose from. However, they’ve all got one thing in common: a whole stack of rules that seem just about impossible to remember. Just getting acquainted with one takes days. How likely are you to follow through?

The first big advantage is that Simple Rules come in small numbers, so they’re easy to remember and adhere to.

Simple Rules help us coordinate collective behavior.

There are certain tasks that individuals can’t perform alone – it’s hard to imagine one person building the Pyramids! In times like these, individuals come together as groups to achieve outcomes they wouldn’t have achieved as individuals.

And it’s not just humans that need groupwork: the animal kingdom thrives on it too. Consider the Japanese honeybee. A single bee stands no chance against a fierce and gigantic hornet that approaches the hive. But together, the bees can defeat the intruder. They cluster together around the hornet and vibrate their wings so fast that the attacker dies from overheating. This is called “thermoballing.”

Three kinds of Simple Rules help us make better decisions.

Now that we know what Simple Rules are and why they work, let’s consider the different types of Simple Rules. There are six of them in total. The first three are rules of thumb that help you make better decisions: boundary rules, prioritizing rules and stopping rules.

Boundary rules guide you if you have to make a typical yes-or-no decision. Imagine you’re a burglar: How do you decide whether to break into a house? Of course, you’ll want to go for an unoccupied house – but how can you tell?

Three more Simple Rules improve our performance.

After exploring the Simple Rules that help us make the right decisions, we’ll now consider the three rules that can help you do things better.

It starts with how-to rules. Their most important feature is that they’re not too prescriptive, leaving ample space for creativity. Take, for example, sports commentators. In the early days, they’d just say what came to their mind, until BBC announcer Seymour Joly de Lotbiniere revolutionized the role.

Experience and negotiation allow us to create our own Simple Rules.

We can’t just pull our personal Simple Rules out of nowhere. To make sure that our rules are the right ones, we need to base them on a vast and reliable source of knowledge. That source? None other than our own personal experiences.

Every day we learn something new about how to get by in the world. In fact, we’ve been learning all our lives! Why not take what you’ve learnt from the past and turn it into some rules that’ll help you in the future?

Create your personal Simple Rules in three steps.

If you’re eager to develop your own Simple Rules, there are three crucial steps to take. First, figure out the critical action that will help you achieve your goal.

For a company that wants to increase profits, the critical action could be to increase the one factor that leads to most profits. For example, the trading platform eToro has a special feature, eToro OpenBook, where expert investors share their trading strategies. Many investment novices go there for valuable advice. The expert investors whose advice has the greatest following achieve the rank of “Popular Investor.”

Simple Rules are not forever.

After a while, we can get so used to our Simple Rules that following them requires no effort at all. Of course, this is a very comfortable level to achieve. Sadly, it doesn’t last.

Even if your initial rules still work out somehow, you shouldn’t stop striving to improve on them. Rules that worked well once may become less than adequate if the situation changes. For instance, usually it’s a good rule to eat an apple a day but if your teeth enamel gets thinner, sugary apples suddenly aren’t so good to eat any more.

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What is Simple Rules about?

Simple Rules (2015) contains the ultimate rules of thumb that’ll guide you to your goals in your professional life, and your personal life too. The tips provided in these blinks will help you rediscover simplicity in an increasingly complex modern world, without committing you to a crazy checklist that takes over your life.

Best quote from Simple Rules

For those who wield the power of Simple Rules, complexity is not destiny.

—Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Who should read Simple Rules?

Managers struggling to keep employees engaged in their programs
Readers who want to overcome insomnia, lose weight or learn from Tina Fey
Anyone who wants to tame today’s overwhelming complexity

About the Author

Donald Sull is management guru and expert on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. He is also a former professor at Harvard and the London Business School.

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt is a professor of strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She is also the coauthor of Competing on the Edge: Strategy is Structured Chaos.

Categories with Simple Rules

Psychology Career & Success Productivity

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