Review of "Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action," by John Spence

 Review of

Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action, by John Spence, ISBN 9780470494516

Four out of five stars

Easily said, difficult to execute

 While most achievement targets are simple to state, they are hard to achieve. For example, there is the oft-repeated adage, “buy low, sell high.” Easy to state, but very hard to precisely know when the price has hit a valley before rising or hit a peak before falling.

 Spence states six principles of business success. They are:

*) Vivid vision

*) Best people

*) Robust communication

*) Sense of urgency

*) Disciplined execution

*) Extreme customer focus.

All simple to state and easy to understand in the abstract. Hard to execute in practice.

 For example, it is easy to understand that there must be a vision for what the organization should be doing. However, the business world is littered with the residue of companies that had a vivid vision that was either false or had a limited lifespan. The sense of urgency is also real, but as Spence notes, this is something that must be tempered. Urgency can range from “get it done it a week” to “we need to make a decision within six months.” Deciding which situation is the reality is generally very hard.

 No one can dispute that these six principles are a map to business success, but as always implementing them correctly is the hard part. Spence puts down some sound advice, but once again he seems to be a little star struck from the title. None of these six principles is easy to execute, managing to keep a group of talented people focused on the stated goals is always hard. Human nature, especially when involving smart and ambitious people is always a challenge.

 While this book contains some sound advice for business success, it suffers from a serious deficiency. One should never make the claim that success in business is simple, especially when you preface it with the word “awesomely.” There just is no such thing.

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