In the ever-changing world of business, we’ve arrived at a point where process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we’ve forgotten how to think. And the very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them back. It’s time to Kill the Company.
What this audiobook suggests is simple: to SIMPLIFY by getting rid of things first rather than continually building on what doesn’t work; a form of spring cleaning for your organization. Innovation specialist Lisa Bodell urges companies to question assumptions and to challenge rules that have outlived their time. Killing these status quo attitudes makes space for change and more value-added work, like thinking. Bodell tells us that these changes need not be one-size-fits-all initiatives that are forced upon employees. Instead, we need to embrace smaller, positive behavioral changes that create ripple effects throughout the organization. Too many change initiatives simply add another layer of processes to the to-do lists of already overwhelmed and tired employees. Not this one. Innovation is supposed to make things better, not worse, easier, not more complicated. Kill the Company is your guide for simplifying and streamlining, then building and maintaining a place where everyone’s innovative spirit and energy fuel the long-term goals of your organization. A company that empowers its people to think critically, question relentlessly, and act boldly, to move from Zombies, Inc. to Think, Inc., will own the future.

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day.
Complexity is killing companies’ ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today’s corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognize which activities are time-sucks and which create lasting value.
Lisa Bodell’s simplification method has several unique principles:
• Simplification is a skill that’s available to us all, yet very few leaders use it.
• Simplification is the right thing to do-for our customers, for our company, and for each other. Operating with simplification as our core business model will make it easier to be respectful of each other’s time.
• Simplification drives culture, and culture in turn drives employee engagement, customer relations, and overall productivity.
This book is inspired by Bodell’s passion for eliminating barriers to innovation and productivity. In it, she explains why change and innovation are so hard to achieve-and it’s not what you might expect. The reality is this: we spend our days drowning in mundane tasks like meetings, emails, and reports. These are often self-created complexities that prevent us from getting to the meaningful work that truly matters.
Using simple stories and techniques, Why Simple Wins shows that by using simplicity as an operating principle, we can eliminate the busy work that puts a chokehold on us every day, and instead spend time on the work that we value.