Simply Brilliant: The Competitive Advantage of Common Sense Book

You need Fergus O'Connell's Simply Brilliant. Are you needlessly complicating your business decisions by paying too much attention to skill, management knowledge, experience or philosophies? None of these things, argues O'Connell, can hold a match to good old common sense. You may have come across the expression 'it's not rocket science'. Launching, flying and returning the space shuttle is rocket science, and requires the application of complex scientific thought. But most of us aren't flight directors at NASA and the things we do aren't rocket science. Too often, we look for complex solutions when simpler ones would be more appropriate, easier to find and simpler to implement. This gem of a book is the perfect antidote to the endless tomes about how to leverage your core competencies and think "outside the box". Instead, it advises you to look for simple problems, simple solutions and direct approaches. If there's a philosophy here, it's this: be nice to people you work with, and try to see problems from their point of view. O'Connell, who also wrote the classic business guide The Silver Bullet, has a wonderfully dry sense of humour, and pokes fun at any reader who dares to take themselves too seriously. A series of questionnaires are designed to reveal how able you are to see simple solutions to business scenarios, from a drop in customer satisfaction to overdue projects. This is a manual of sorts: covering how to plan, how to prioritise, how to see projects through, how to remember the customer's needs. This is simple stuff, simply written. But don't underestimate Simply Brilliant's value--much of this stuff is forgotten in the rush of everyday business. As O'Connell says--the thing about common sense is that it isn't all that common in reality. --Sally WhittleRead More