The Connection Magazine A.I.M. Mutual Fall 2016 | Page 14

LESS IS MORE

Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish is founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and
coaching company, Verne has spent the past 30 years educating entrepreneurial
teams.  He’s the author of Scaling Up that uses approaches honed from over
three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives.

LESS IS MORE
Both in Business & Life!

OVER the last few years a convergence of news, reading, and
conversations have screamed the mantra “less is more.” It first
grabbed me as I was watching an interview of China’s first track
and field superstar Liu Xiang, who captured gold in the 110-meter
hurdles over a decade ago at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens,
Greece, and set a new world record.
Unlike most athletes who train incessantly, Liu took a scientific
approach and trained just three hours/day. Many athletes
experience this same boost in performance after coming back from
a break that has limited their practice. Less practice is sometimes
more.
Just this past year, Denmark was again named the happiest
place in the world by the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. Noted
Adrian White, an analytical social psychologist at the University of
Leicester in central England, “Smaller countries tend to be a little
happier because there is a stronger sense of collectivism.”
Rereading Thomas Friedman’s classic From Beirut to Jerusalem,
the world would be a lot happier if regional cultures hadn’t been
forced to form artificial countries. Let Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Lebanon go the way of Yugoslavia, breaking up into more culturally
aligned mini-countries. And I don’t think it’s coincidental that 34
of the U.S. states expect to run budget surpluses in 2016 while the
Federal Government continues to bleed red. The less people lumped
together in nation-states, the more fiscally responsible and happy.
Moving closer to the business world, Seth Godin’s must-scan
book is appropriately entitled Small is the New Big, admonishing us
to act small if we want to be big. It’s worth taking a couple minutes
to go to www.sethgodin.com and read his overview of the book
which includes a complimentary download of his title essay.
Writes Godin, “Today, little companies often make more money
than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide
ones. Little jets are way faster (door to door) than big ones.” Given
the additional security obstacles to commercial air travel has made
Godin’s comment on air travel a reality for more and more of us.
Small jets are better than big jets (and less likely to be targets of
terrorism).
Brad Anderson, CEO of $39.5 billion electronics retailer Best
Buy, used ideas from a similar marketing-focused book Angel
Customers and Demon Customers to reduce the number of
FALL 2016

customer groups on which Best Buy is focusing its efforts. Larry
Seldman’s and Geoffrey Colvin’s book points out that some customers
may be highly unprofitable and that not all customers are valuable i.e.,
less customers is more.
Google has shown a similar wisdom on the employee team side.
Recognizing that smaller teams are more effective, Google has
organized their engineers into teams of three to drive hundreds
of innovations. Simply adding a fourth person to the team would
dramatically lessen their impact.
John Carney, CEO of Alexandria, Virginia-based Carney Interactive,
has applied this same less-is-more philosophy to individual quarterly
priorities. Once required to name five priorities each quarter, Carney’s
employees are now asked to outline three. Notes Carney, “inevitably
either the employees, including myself, padded our lists with slam
dunk priorities or found at the end of the quarter that there were two
of the five we simply couldn’t find time to complete.” Fewer priorities
means more focus.
This brings me full circle back to training and education. A while ago
I had the pleasure to hear small business guru Michael Gerber, author
of the huge bestseller E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses
Don’t Work and What to Do About It speak. In his speech, Gerber
discussed the topic of mastery and how his saxophone teacher taught
him, at the early age of eight, the importance of practicing three hours
a day.
No more than a week later, I was talking with my then pre-teen son
Cameron about school, who was dreading the start of a new school
year. When I asked him how he would redesign school, he suggested it
would start around 10am; students would focus on a subject they love
for 90 minutes (his is marine biology); recess and lunch would take
them to 12:45pm; then another 90 minutes of focused learning with
the school day ending at 2:15pm.
His reasoned three hours of focused learning a day seems to align
with both Gerber’s and Liu’s experience about mastery. And Bill
Gates’ Foundation is supporting the creation of high schools with less
students which will also start later in the morning, based on years of
research that support both notions. Smaller schools create better
academic performance.
Where, in your business and personal life. would less give you more?
Think about it and then act.

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