Keeping it Simple

I thought of this when my oldest son, he's 9, tried to extort $2 from my daughter. She flipped it around on him after I suggested she ask him to her look for her money as they cleaned her room. In some of her battles to get her brothers to help her clean up I reminded her that boys work best with simple instructions.

In a past life before returning to my family's farm I had worked on a variety of hog farms, ranging from medium to large size. One of the most important things I took away from them was the most productive farms were the ones with training and operating procedures that were the simplest and easiest to understand. Many times I thought a trained monkey could do many of the jobs that I did from the stand point that the procedures and training made it simple.

This is one of my weak links as a manager is that I tend to complicate things more than I should. Normal procedures tend to get altered by people when they aren't laid out in a simple easy to follow method.