Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

In conversation the other day, Chris Gibbons observed that in business, as in nature, simpler usually connotes more successful.  I agreed, but noted that nature has millions of years to evolve successful strategies, while businesspeople face somewhat tighter deadlines.

Clarity of business purpose.  A tight elevator pitch.  A well articulated value proposition.  Focus.  Our deepest instincts tell us that these are important telltales of a successful business.  My friend Mitch Hobish noted an analogy to the mathematical concept of an "elegant" solution -- one in which the maximum desired effect is achieved with the simplest effort.

However, Nobel Prizes are awarded to mathematicians who discover truly elegant solutions.

Over the last few years, I've developed a much greater appreciation of how simplicity in business is more often earned than divined.  In our quest for the simple, we should be wary of being simplistic.  In the last years of the dot com bubble, intelligent, articulate MBAs raised millions of venture capital based on skillfully crafted business plans that were fundamentally wrong.  The simplicity they offered was an illusion.

Careful research suggests that most promising startups are characterized by irreducible uncertainty.  That is, at the beginning, the business proposition is ambiguous.  It's only through the process of engaging in trial and error -- opportunistic adaptation -- that uncertainty is resolved and simplicity emerges.  Over the last couple of years, I've seen the process unfold in the successes of Greg Gianforte at RightNow Technologies and Andrew Field at PrintingForLess, to name but two.  Today, both entrepreneurs can explain their businesses with enviable clarity.  Both earned the simplicity of their presentation through years of skillful bootstrapping.

I've faked clarity in the past -- and failed as a result.  In my business today, I constantly struggle to simplify.  We're making progress, but it's hard fought.  To this point, here are the simple lessons that we've learned:

Focus on the individual entrepreneur.  Don't try to solve general problems.  Help an entrepreneur resolve his dilemmas -- one at a time.

Reduce the threshold energy of useful peer conversations.  A "useful" conversation is one that helps accelerate a decision.  Barriers to useful conversations include time, cost, and social distance.  We at Small World Networks must be a catalyst in the complete sense of the word.  We need to precipitate processes and events without being an active participant.  In other words, we must be central to, rather than the center of, our network.

Connect the connectors.  Make the world a smaller place for our constituents in order to improve their access to people who can help get things done.