How often do you sit through a meeting in which you walk out the other end going “what was that all about”?  It happens all the time when looking at new businesses.  I often ask the person doing the pitch to explain the business in 30 sec – a minute maximum.  If they cant, how will they ever explain it to a customer!

I think Apple is probably the ultimate embodiment of simplicity as the ultimate sophistication.  How often do you look at an Apple product and realise that have thought about almost everything and the packaged it into a highly attractive and incredibly simple to use package.  This takes real skill and Steve Jobs clearly knew what he was doing.

So the challenge for all of us is to firstly work out what it is we are building / doing / communicating.  I don’t mean the high level “we are building a property portal” but the more in depth “we are connecting buyers and sellers” or perhaps there is an even deeper “we are providing the advertiser with a low cost, high value marketing platform”.  What ever the real underlying proposition is, it is important to think through what it is that you are trying to do.

Secondly it is all about how do i put this into simple, easy to understand language.  Or in the case of building a website, into a simple, easy to use interface.  Look at Google.  A massive company built primarily off a single search box.  I often see property portals around the world try to put so much on the page that they forget the real reason people visit the website.  In this case it is about search, search results and the property details page.  Therefore the challenge is to make this as simple as possible, highly intuitive and without clutter (i.e. low value information).

Either way you look at it, keeping it simple is extremely hard but when you achieve it, the value created can be enormous.

Here is the complete list of the top 10 CEO’s who never went to college according to OnlineBestColleges.com.

1. David Oreck
2. Richard Branson
3. Andrew Carnegie
4. John D Rockerfeller
5. Henry Ford
6. Steve Jobs
7. Walt Disney
8. John Paul DeJoria
9. Barry Diller
10. Bill Gates

Check out the full article at http://www.onlinebestcolleges.com/blog/2009/top-10-ceos-who-never-went-to-college/