Back to Basics
For the later part of this week, I have hear the term “Back to basics” or “back to fundamentals” a lot. It has been predicted that the economic crisis will get worse before getting better and that the solution is to get back to basics. I also read from Jason Seidens’ blog about “applying management advice at home” and much of this post will be in part because of reading that post.
I now vehemently believe that we should all get back to basics, from our personal life, financial life and specially… in context for this blog…. in corporate life. For sometime now, the corporate environment has been lost in translation due to the enormous amount of jargons, technical terms, abbreviations and sophisticated terminologies.
Come to think of it, I don’t even know why we indulge ourselves in engaging in this exercise of who knows what or who knows more, it’s like a cha-cha, a dance of who is more sophisticated or who is in. If you do not know what the other is talking about, you get a sick since satisfaction, a little edge above the others.
During the years of our so called evolution into corporate sophistication, we have actually built up layers and layers of gibberish mambo jumbo that either no one can understand or can implement effectively. If we want to do something new or edge up in the corporate ladder, we make a new program or a new initiative and we name it something really sophisticated and build up a framework or a workflow so full of abbreviation and terms that it will take 200 pages of manuals and a couple hundred hours to fully understand.
This is also so evident in programming and development, softwares or applications have to have a gazillion of features that hardly anyone will use, with more terms, abbreviations that a dictionary. In the IT industry, simplicity is coming back into the mainstream, take gmail and all the web 2.0 apps churning out, even Office 2007, simple interfaces with basic and working features.
This I believe will also be the trend that will come to the corporate world, it will be like a wildfire, start out from a spark and in no time it will swallow the entire forest. The first wave will be simplification of finance, products and services, then the rationalization, centralization and back-end/internal simplification.
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