Idea 13 - Costs of complexity The customer rules. If businesses have learnt anything in the last 50 years, it's to stay laser-focused on the customers and their needs. Give them innovation, give them choice, right? Well, up to a point. Some of those businesses have twigged that rich novelty and variety leads to complexity, and that complexity costs. Keep it simple. This is not a new idea. Its most famous advocate, though not its first, was the English Franciscan friar, William of Occam. 'Occam's razor' said, essentially, that the simplest solution was usually the best, and that was in the 14th century. Sadly, Occam is silent on the profit implications of his principle. Rather more recently, however, consultants Bain & Company found that the 'lowest complexity' companies grew revenues nearly twice as fast as their peers, among the group of 75 it studied across a dozen different industries. It added that revenue growth appeared far more closely linke...