Simplicity
The Invisible Personality of Companies
There’s a moment in Ken Segall’s book Insanely Simple that captures something essential about how simplicity works. Steve Jobs, when presented with early iPhone prototypes, insisted on having only one physical button on the device. In a world where smartphones bristled with keys, call buttons, end buttons, menu buttons, back buttons, Jobs made a choice that seemed almost reckless: strip it all away. Leave just one.
This wasn’t a marketing decision or a branding strategy. It was a reflex. It was the personality. It was the company’s character expressing itself in a single design choice. Jobs understood that users would need time to learn this new interaction model, that reviews might initially criticize the learning curve, that competitors would mock the simplicity as a limitation. He accepted that cost because complexity, even useful complexity, violated something fundamental about who Apple was.
Simplicity in business isn’t a framework you implement or a value you paste on the wall. It’s something deeper, quieter, and far more elusive. It’s the personality of a company, the way integrity or curiosity might define a person. And like any personality trait, you can’t fake it for long.
The Difference Between Strategy and Character
Most companies talk about simplicity. They run workshops on it. They hire consultants to streamline their processes. They create initiatives with names like “Project Clarity” or “Simplify 2025.” But this is simplicity as strategy, and strategies can be copied, tweaked, and abandoned when the next trend arrives.
Simplicity as personality is different. It’s not something you do; it’s something you are. It shows up in the small, everyday decisions that no one outside the company ever sees. It’s in how a team debates a feature request, how someone structures an email, who gets invited to a meeting, and crucially, who doesn’t.
Consider Zerodha, India’s largest retail stockbroker. When the company was growing rapidly, founder Nithin Kamath made choices that baffled many in the startup ecosystem. They refused to enter personal loans and credit cards despite high margins, with Kamath explaining that unsecured lending brings “an entire ecosystem of collections, recovery agents and repayment chases” that didn’t align with their philosophy. This wasn’t a quarterly strategic decision debated in the boardroom. It was their default response, their reflex.
Kamath has publicly stated that “with everybody chasing ‘engagement,’ we seem to have made many things on the internet annoying and unusable,” explaining why Zerodha doesn’t send push notifications or emails urging customers to trade more. The company became India’s largest broker without a single advertisement, relying purely on word of mouth.
How Simplicity Forms (and Why It Fades)
In the beginning, most startups are simple by necessity. With five people in a room, you don’t need elaborate processes. Communication is direct. Decisions are fast. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. But here’s the thing: this isn’t simplicity as personality yet. This is just small.
True simplicity as personality forms when a company is still small enough to be simple but chooses to stay that way as it grows. It’s the conscious, repeated choice to resist the gravitational pull of complexity. And that pull is strong.
Research from the Corporate Executive Board found that over the past 15 years, the number of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals needed in large corporations has increased by 50% to 350% (Ashkenas, 2013). This isn’t happening because companies want to be complicated. It’s happening because complexity creeps in disguised as solutions.
Someone suggests adding a layer of approval to prevent mistakes. It sounds reasonable. Another person proposes a new role to coordinate between departments. It makes sense. A team creates a dashboard to track a new metric. Why not? Each decision, in isolation, seems logical. But collectively, they transform the company’s personality from simple to Byzantine.
Microsoft in the 2000s is a textbook example. The company that had revolutionized personal computing became a place where, according to former employees, shipping a simple feature could require signoffs from dozens of people across multiple divisions (Foley, 2012). The personality had shifted. The default was no longer “how do we make this simpler?” but “how do we make sure everyone is consulted?” These are fundamentally different reflexes.
What Simplicity Looks Like in Practice
If you walked into a company where simplicity is the personality, what would you see?
You’d see meetings with three people instead of twelve. You’d see documents that are two pages instead of twenty. You’d see org charts that look suspiciously flat for a company of that size. But more than what you’d see, you’d feel something: the absence of friction.
Zoho, the Chennai-based SaaS giant, demonstrates simplicity in a different way. Founded by Sridhar Vembu in 1996, the company serves over 100 million users in 150+ countries, is entirely bootstrapped, and profitable, all without raising a single dollar in venture capital. Vembu believes that “building software is best done in small teams, in informal environments. Numbers and metrics-only-driven approaches destroy creativity and result in soulless products.”
This isn’t just philosophy; it’s how the company operates daily. While competitors chase funding rounds and aggressive expansion, Zoho quietly builds products, invests in R&D, and maintains a flat organizational structure that keeps decision-making simple and fast.
The Complexity Trap: Why Smart People Build Complicated Things
Here’s the paradox: everyone knows simplicity is valuable. Ask any executive, and they’ll tell you they want their organization to be simpler. So why does every company seem to drift toward complexity? Because complexity feels safe. It feels thorough. It feels professional.
Adding a step to a process means you’re being careful. Creating a new committee means you’re being inclusive. Hiring a specialist means you’re taking things seriously. Each addition is a small act of risk mitigation. And in isolation, each one might reduce risk. But collectively, they create a different kind of risk: the risk of becoming so complex that you can’t move.
A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that managers at large firms spend about a day each week in meetings and communications to manage organizational complexity (Ashkenas, 2010). That’s not time spent on strategy or innovation or customer problems. That’s time spent managing the machine they’ve built.
The phenomenon of feature bloat illustrates this perfectly. Paytm, which started as a simple mobile recharge application, evolved to offer services ranging from movie ticket bookings to flight reservations and banking. As it diversified, the application became cluttered, and users often found themselves lost in the multitude of options available. The initial simplicity that attracted users was overshadowed by the volume of features.
The companies that maintain simplicity as personality have somehow developed an immune response to this. They treat each potential complication as a threat, not an opportunity. When someone proposes adding a layer or a step or a role, the default response is skepticism, not acceptance.
The Quiet Power of Being Simple
Simplicity as personality doesn’t announce itself. These companies don’t usually talk about how simple they are. They don’t need to, because it shows up everywhere: in their products, their communications, their culture, their decision-making.
And here’s what’s fascinating: customers feel it even if they can’t name it. There’s a reason people describe certain products or companies as “just working” or “making sense.” That’s not accident or luck. That’s personality shining through every interaction.
The companies that have simplicity in their DNA share something beyond their processes or structures. They share a reflex, an instinct that kicks in when faced with a choice between simple and complicated. And unlike frameworks or strategies, you can’t copy an instinct. You can only develop it, protect it, and hope it survives the growth that inevitably comes.
Because that’s the real test of simplicity as personality: not whether you can be simple when you’re small, but whether you can stay simple when staying simple is the hardest thing you could possibly do.
References
- Ashkenas, R. (2010). Why We Secretly Love Meetings. Harvard Business Review.
- Foley, M. J. (2012). Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. John Wiley & Sons.
- Kamath, N. (2023). Why we don’t provide personal and credit card loans through Zerodha Capital.
Retrieved from https://nithinkamath.me/blog/why-we-dont-provide-personal-and-credit-card-loans-through-zerodha-capital/ - Nadella, S. (2017). Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone. Harper Business.
- Segall, K. (2012). Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success. Portfolio.
- Sharma, S. (2023). There’s another definition for “App Bloat”. Weave Design. Retrieved from https://medium.com/weavedesign/theres-another-definition-for-app-bloat-63e476501ec2 zoho Corporation. (n.d.). Our Story. Retrieved from https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html