Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

“The nerd book of the summer.”—Tom Keene, Bloomberg TV

“Whether you run an organization or are simply trying to survive modern life, this book is gold.”—Chris Anderson, curator of TED Talks

Armed with a few simple rules, you can tackle even the most complex of problems.

Drawing on more than a decade of rigorous research, Sull and Eisenhardt provide a clear framework for developing effective rules and making them better over time. They find insights in unexpected places, from the way Tina Fey codified her experience working at Saturday Night Live into rules for producing 30 Rock (rule five: never tell a crazy person he’s crazy), to Japanese engineers using the foraging rules of slime molds to optimize Tokyo’s rail system. This is the definitive playbook for living simply and efficiently in every sphere of life.

“Simple Rules . . . will help you spot unnecessary complexity, eliminate maddening frustration, make the right decisions faster, and have a whole lot more fun along way.”—Robert I. Sutton, best-selling author of The No Asshole Rule and coauthor of Scaling Up Excellence

“We all deal with complexity now, and this book will show you how you can do more with less.”—Michael J. Mauboussin, head of global financial strategies, Credit Suisse

“Simple Rules explains how we can manage to make meaningful progress in a world that exceeds human understanding . . . This is a harbinger of the information economy to come.” —Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson

A WASHINGTON POST LEADERSHIP BOOK TO WATCH FOR 2015 • A BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK MUST-READ BOOK OF THE SUMMER

DONALD SULL is a global expert on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. He is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and was formerly a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, where he won three teaching awards. He earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate from Harvard University. He has published three award-winning books, ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles, and over one hundred case studies, articles, and book chapters on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. The Economist identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century and Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus.

KATHLEEN M. EISENHARDT is the S. W. Ascherman Professor of Strategy at Stanford, a highly cited author, and the co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Her research focuses on strategy, strategic decision making, and organizational design in highly uncertain markets. She is the coauthor of Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, winner of the George R. Terry Book Award. A fellow of the World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative, she is also the first author featured in Harvard Business Review’s On Point collections. She holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering, an M.S. in computer science, and a Ph.D. from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.