Topical, easy-to-read book and was able to easily read it in one evening. It covers many real life work examples about how the author’s organization helps companies “simplify work”. The content is consistently on message and while it shifts between the professional and personal, the message is focused and clear. I have a list of items to follow up on and referenced youtube videos and articles I want to check out.

While the author is obviously a passionate expert, I wouldn't consider the book *essential* or really covering new ground or new concepts. Much of the content references other disciplines - six sigma, design thinking - without really diving into them deeply enough for the reader to apply them in a meaningful way. It covers well-trod advice that is pretty familiar to any connected person who reads business social media, is on linkedin, reads HBR, is familiar with Apple, or turns on Netflix to watch Marie Kondo. We are too easily distracted, we need to set distilled priorities and goals, communicate more effectively, leadership should set the direction and set workers free to innovate, we should meditate, declutter and turn off our email.

While the author recommends distilling messages into visuals and bullets - the kindle version suffers from a lack of lists, bullets, or consolidated content. The recommendations are redundant at times. The examples are interesting but lack detail and depth. I did find it valuable for a few insights and “reminders”. Maybe that’s the point - no magic here, simplification is about going back to basics and implementing what we already know.

*I received a copy of this book from www.netgalley.com in exchange for an unbiased review.

Simplify Work by Jesse W. Newton shares the interesting point that when businesses grow to a certain size and want to be seen as "professional", they add in process and complexity that hampers their ability to grow further. It's actually a book about design thinking, and if I'd known that, I wouldn't have picked it up. It pushes the idea of organisational agility as a 21st century way to manage work because process and management structures are not working for the complex workplace - and idea I can get behind, although it doesn't feel particularly new. There are lots of examples of poor process and areas of business that could be streamlined, and Lean Six Sigma features.

Simplify Work is just that simple. The book gives advice one would usually get from a boss or a simple search on Google. It’s a reminder of our daily complex lives and everything we should be doing to Simplify it. I was not as engaged in this book as I'd like to be. I would love to see this book brought more personal experiences and a unique and voice to simplify tasks mentioned.

Overall, this book is a good read, but it does lack a voice that separates the book from reading the same information on blogs.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I found myself quibbling with this book, but there is much to like, particularly the effort to make our workplaces better for employees. The writing could have been simplified, such as sentences like, ""Another key determinant of implementation success is change management." I wish he would have just written that matrix organizations suck, Lean Sigma 6 didn't work, and open plan offices caused everyone to work at home so they could get something done, but that's not the language of organizational consultants. I didn't find the section on personal organization to add much to the literature, but let's keep working on what he has started with regards to overly complex and bloated corporations.

The book started out promising. Newton has clearly seen and lived the pains of over-complexity in his time as a consultant and articulated the problem statement spectacularly. People spend too much time on low-value tasks like cc'ing hordes of coworkers before doing anything and cranking out reports that nobody will look at. Anyone who has worked at an overly-complex organization will really nod along at Newton's setting of the stage.

The solution starts out decent enough by going into design thinking methodologies. I would very much take issue with the statement that IDEO "created" design thinking as there is a vast history and debate on the topic, see this one for example https://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/a-brief-history-of-design-thinking-the-theory-p1/. This claim just sounds poorly-researched and indeed the book begins to unravel due to poor research. Too many of the citations are coming from consultant reports, popular press like the Daily Mail and yes, even Wikipedia. Some of the information is quite good and could be put into practice as I am sure Newton has successfully with his clients, but I would want a book to have a little more meat than going to Wikipedia for citations. There are so many titans of thought in complex systems and we never hear from any of them directly.

By Chapter 4, "Simplify You" I am ready just to go back to Inc.com if I want some journalistic self-help business writing. "Clean out your desk... plan your week ahead of time.... turn off notifications on your phone." All great advice, but this isn't the kind of heady material I am expecting in a book about beating complexity.

This book's content would probably work better as serialized for a business blog as it is not seriously-researched enough to hold together as a book. While the author has such a gift for describing the woes of a complex organization that I felt as if I were back in my first cubicle, reliving the experience isn't enough. A good book should show you how to reconstruct that experience and this one just offered the usual business self-help talking points.