Martin Lindstrom wields his common sense axe & offers tips to combat red tape and corporate BS.

1. Book Summary

2. Companies are so entangled in their own internally generated issues, and
further beset by reams of invisible red tape inside employees heads, that
they lose sight of their core purpose – and inevitably pay the price.

3. When people start working inside organizations, something happens to
them. They forget they’re humans. They start adhering to rules, processes,
procedures, and official and unofficial codes of behavior that make no
sense to anyone outside the organization.

4. It’s harder to acknowledge when something is missing than to see it when its
right in front of you – a statement that’s certainly true as far as common
sense is concerned.

5. Common sense is ‘seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought
to be done.’

6. In my experience, the lack of common sense in companies (and in life) has
a clear, if indirect connection to the increasing disappearance of empathy.

7. I suspect empathy has slipped even further away. With our phones creating
a barrier between us and the world, we don’t notice things anymore.

8. If empathy is linked so strongly to common sense, how does its
disappearance affect companies? The answer is that businesses today have
squeezed out almost everything that could be called “human”. If something
can’t be measured or quantified, it doesn’t exist.

9. Most memorable customer experiences have three things in common. First,
the experience happened when the customer was in a real time of need.
Second, the employee she dealt with fully empathized with what she was
going through. Third, he or she went beyond their prescribed roles to solve
the problem.
Most of the time this doesn’t happen. Why? Simple companies never sit
down and talk to their customers. People who work in organizations forget
that they’re customers too.

10. By bringing together employees with customers, a company’s muscle
memory weakens – and resets toward a genuine customer-oriented
mindset.

11. Systems and procedures try to keep customers at a distance. They turn a
company’s focus inward. Along the way, continuity is lost.
At a hotel (or any company), the role of employees isn’t just to carry out
their functions but to create continuity by collaborating closely with all
other departments.

12. A political company is one where management and employees are so
preoccupied by their own divisions, hierarchy, and metrics that they lose
sight of anything outside themselves.

13. In the absence of a crisis, transparency is the best way to eradicate
politics and to restore a company’s common sense.

14. It’s impossible to write about the negative effects of technology without
sounding crabby, old or willfully out-of-touch.
But digital innovations and accelerations that were designed to improve
and streamline our lives have ended up in many cases complicating them.

15. “Tech is a truculent force not likely to be regulated at the pace that it
evolves in the market. Phones and pharmaceuticals, cars and construction,
all make life better. More relevant is to place our efforts on how to make
tech serve us, rather than us becoming its slaves. “

16. Attempts on the part of some businesses to speed up and infuse
technology into their procedures, just for the sake of using technology
defies common sense a lot of the time.

17. Our intuition has evolved over centuries and is an integral part of human
DNA. But gradually, and with almost no resistance, we’ve permitted
technology and data to overwrite centuries of accumulated human
intuition.
The worldwide multiplication of data gives rise to a question” what does it
mean to “know” something? If data conflicts with our gut or if an answer can
only be found online, we eventually lose faith in our own instincts, intuition
and sensitivity to know certain things without knowing why we now them.
We begin looking at the world through processes of systems or both.

18. With time the priority in most businesses – versus long range thinking –is it
any wonder that common sense is so lacking in companies?

19. One of the many problems with busyness is that cluttering our brains
actually makes us less productive. The global trend of everyone being as
busy as they are means that more we justify that fact, the less time we have
for ourselves, to come up with new and imaginative ideas or to just sit back,
reflecting.

20. Meetings and PowerPoint decks can eat up close to 50 percent of our
time when we work in a company. It’s a percentage few people are
eager to acknowledge, perhaps because it’s a reminder of just poorly
organizations (and the people who work in them) administrate their
own time.

21. Rules for running successful, commonsensical meetings. 1) no phones, no
web surfing, no emails, no texts. 2) establish an agenda. 3) keep to a time
limit. A meeting should last no longer than 30 minutes. Elon Musk says, “walk
out of a meeting or drop off a call, as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding
value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste
their time” 4) be aware of ‘loop thinking’. A conversation begins
somewhere, rises, peaks and then returns to where it started. 5) Everything
doesn’t have to be a meeting. 6) Acknowledge up front the inherent
limitations of online meetings.

22. Across the world, ‘compliance’ has become an excuse to protect the status
quo and ensure organizations remain in place. To not do things and ensure
organizations remain in place. To not do things or follow commonsense.
Compliance generates fear-and knocks out common sense.
We perform better in environments where we feel ‘psychologically safe’.

23. Often its harder to eliminate a nonsensical policy than it is implement one.
And why is this? because everyone in the company is terrified that is a
policy disappears and something goes wrong, then they will shoulder the
blame.

24. Legal statutes and compliance laws are so ingrained in our society, and
have so shunted our thinking and our behavior, that we don’t even
recognize them anymore.

25. I tell executives that need to adopt an H2H theory. H2H stands for ‘human to
human’. Their customers are human, not numbers on an excel sheet, and
their employees are human too. (this sounds incredibly obvious. It’s not)

26. Five steps to reunite companies and their employees with their own
common sense, empathy and humanity. 1) step out of the “cage” with
small, tangible, immediately ‘winnable’ steps. If the proposed change is too
big or bold, the fear of the unknow is too great and most will resist it. 2)
Courage occurs when companies and employees begin instituting a series
of small changes that yield immediate results. 3) celebrate small victories 4)
Check the cage – be ready with solutions for problems 5) build a
contribution culture.

27. The last step of the change process is to create a governing body to ensure
the organization doesn’t slip back. Actually create a Ministry of Common
Sense.

28. Set it up in 3 simple steps. Endorse (where you get Senior Management to
endorse), Energize (where you motivate the culture through a series of proof
points that the Ministry works) and Externalize (where you put yourself in
other’s shoes incl. customers etc.)

29. A good or innovative idea is like a perfect rectangle. What generally,
happens to that as it passes through an organization is that its sharp corners
– representing what makes it fresh, new or memorable – are sanded and
eventually smoothed down to nothing. In the end, the rectangle ends up
looking more like a circle, one that pleases everybody and therefor
nobody.