My mother made the best lasagna. Seven ingredients. Done in sixty minutes.
Last week, I watched a chef on YouTube make the same dish. Nineteen ingredients. Three hours. Truffle oil. Microgreens. A foam.
It wasn’t lasagna anymore. It was a monument to complexity.
We do this in business constantly.
The founder creates a product that solves a real problem. It works. Customers love it.
Then the features creep in. The enhancements. The “improvements” that nobody requested but everyone on the product team felt compelled to add.
Two years later, the thing that made your product remarkable—its elegant simplicity—is buried under layers of well-intentioned complexity.
The story of Survey Monkey. Simple, simple. Others who were first, created more, only to fail dismally.
I often see this with organizations. The strategy that fit on one page becomes a forty-slide deck. The meeting that took thirty minutes now requires two hours and a pre-read. The decision process that previously worked perfectly now requires three committees and a steering group. Why, because the mantra is we need more, versus we need what matters.
We confuse elaboration with excellence.
Here’s what Greg McKeown taught us in Essentialism: the question isn’t “How can we make this better?” The question is “What problem are we actually solving?”
Because sometimes – most times – the answer isn’t to add more. It’s to protect what already works.
Your mother knew this. She didn’t need truffle oil to make something people remembered.
Neither do you.
