Some is plenty

I was speaking with my old friend Bruce Davies from Modtec the other day. Bruce was on our business owner program back in the day, and one of my fond memories of him is the session at which he was supposed to speak about what he’d learned in the course of building his very successful company. He had a beautiful PowerPoint deck prepared, and then just as I was setting up the gear, he said ‘actually Mike I think I’ll just do it without the slides’.

He proceeded to deliver this amazing talk, not perfectly structured, not perfectly presented, but absolutely unforgettable for anyone who heard it, full of wisdom and insight, pain and passion, successes and disasters. He put himself out of his familiar zone and got into flow.

Bruce has now moved his entire business to India, and has grown a team there as well as network of suppliers. In the course of the conversation Bruce said “there’s a Hindi word I hear often – jurgad (or jugaad) basically means ‘take only what you need and nothing more’. In the West we think more is better, but here that’s seen as wasteful.”

I reflected on that idea. It’s more than minimalism which enjoyed a brief fad. It reminded me of an saying I heard, again from a non-Western culture: ‘some is plenty, enough is too much’.

What does "take just enough" mean for us as leaders and managers?

• Constraints spark creativity

  As Lord Ernest Rutherford said of science in New Zealand 100 years ago “we have no money, therefore we must think!”

• Make a start

  Don’t wait until you have everything you ‘need’, because you ‘need’ less than you think

• ‘More’ can create complexity, and complexity creates waste

  It takes more time and attention to manage resources and processes that are actually surplus to requirements

• ‘Fit for purpose’ is the only meaningful definition of quality

  Understand the 20% that creates 80% of the value and dispense with the rest

These are just my reflections. I would like you to take them and think about which of them applies to your business. For example, one of our guard rails in developing program content is ‘only what matters’.

And of course, I would encourage you to take only one, not all of them. Just the one that matters most.