Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated Hardcover – April 1, 2014

The book challenges the general wisdom in HR to address the problems with either the hard approach (org.chart, metrics) or the soft approach (team building, feelings). It presents a new way to make organizations collaborate and thus more productive.The book as all BCG authors is with a clear structure and with examples.

Six Simple Rules provides managers with an alternative to the two management approaches (hard, metric driven; and soft, mind-set driven) that the authors suggest have overcomplicated, and thus diminished the ability of organizations to achieve their full potential.The underlying point of this analysis is: the biggest problem faced by organizations is that people in the organization don't do their best work and don't cooperate with one another to achieve the best results for the organization.Managers and leaders have been trapped by management theories that abstract employees into mechanistic parts or strive to grasp organizational zeitgeist (intellectualizing collective behaviors). The solution proposed is for managers to get out of the office (where they can safely intellectualize about how to solve abstract problems), engage with employees, figure out what they actually do, and empower them to do their work in ways that require them to cooperate with one another for the good of the organization.The six rules are illustrated with case studies of anonymized corporations (service, transportation and production) with which the authors consulted.There are sidebars that synthesize the key points of the rules. This is more effective in the print than the Kindle version. In the Kindle version the sidebar is plunked into the middle of the chapter. I think publishers with an eye toward digital content need to spend a bit more time thinking about digital layout on the kindle. Cooperation between publishers and Amazon would be beneficial for consumers. Sadly there is no way to apply pain points since digital books are generally not returned if they have some value. In this case, the "sidebars" aren't terribly distracting, but they'd perhaps be better placed in a consolidated appendix or maybe between chapters.There also seemed to be a gap between the abstracted rule and the case study, leaving me wondering how I would go apply the rule inside my kind of organization (education sector). This was in part remedied in the Conclusion, where the authors laid out a process that helps one envision implementing a conversion to a six rules approach.Overall an interesting and thought provoking read.

After reading the Introduction and the first chapter I knew this was not a management book like I was used to reading. Instead of finishing immediately I decided to add Six Simple Rules to the reading list for my MBA students this quarter. I was not disappointed nor were they. This is the first book on management that actually looks at work the way people really work and is realistic about the manner that employees survive in the midst of the well intended but often misguided attempts at controling behavior and driving results. In fact it is the first management book I have read that recognizes results as an emergent rather than driven process.This being said, there is nothing simple about the six simple rules except the way they have been named. Both the traditional hard and the soft approaches to management were developed with one similar feature, management was not required to really get involved with and understand how their employees really worked, it was the process or technique that was supposed to provide the answer and if the employee continued to fail it must then be an issue of character or attitude. Six Simple Rules is a "roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches" approach to management, one that calls for manager to engage with both the work they are asking to be done and the people they are asking to do it.I can tell you this approach works because for over twenty years I have used a similar approach. I did not have the powerful vocabulary that Morieux and Tollman have developed but one thing I am sure they'd be willing to admit, it didn't come to them all at once. Only time can produce insight like you'll find in Six Simple Rules, time and a willingness to set aside everything you know about management and simply see what it talking place in front of you. This book will make the reality at work be a little easier to see. Read it, try it, share it, discuss it. With time you'll be able to practice the rules to an extent that they may in fact become simple.

Organizations seem to face an increasingly complex world and they have becoming more complicated to try to cope with their environment. This complication is not working. Organizations respond slower and more rigidly which is not making customers happier and is not making employees more engaged. One response is the call to simplify. This book takes the perspective that the complexity may be a source of opportunity, but the complication is just a cost. To cope with complexity, the best hope is to depend on the judgment of the organization's people and that requires giving them more autonomy to act. It also depends on those people to cooperate to utilize all of the organizations capabilities to cope with complex problems. Three "rules" address the issue of autonomy and three address the issue of cooperation. The book details some of the ways that more conventional approaches to management increase complication. It is this comparison that sets this book apart from those the books that advocate empowerment, collaboration, improved mind-sets and structures which a firmly rooted in either scientific or human relation schools of management.

The best book I have read to date on fighting complexity, however it is in itself written in a very complex language

A great book to learn best practices for change management within complex systems that often stubbornly resist innovation. Keep in by your bedside and read it again and again!

Yves Morieux nos comprate la forma de transformación interna y la simplificación administrativa aplicada a las organizaciones, el Cómo nuestra burocracia e ineficiencia son los principales topes de la transformación empresarial

Un gran libro para hacer reflexionar de muchos problemas que tiene toda organización compleja. Muy recomendable para todo aquel que forme parte de una organización compleja y se pregunte porque cuesta tanto esfuerzo llevar a cabo cosas en apariencia simples. Simplemente la primera de las reglas es tan de "Perogrullo" que asusta que sea una de las más incumplidas e incomprendidas del mundo de la gestión de organizaciones. NO tiene desperdicio!. Por cierto como aperitivo las dos charlas TED del autor Yves Morieux son más que recomendables.

The authors offer a very different and valid way to look at enterprises and "culture" and how to develop them.

Six Simples rules : how to manage complexity ....Muito útil e grande fonte de reflexão sobre comportamento de todas organizações