Simplify and Add Lightness

"Keep it short." Some maxims become trite because they are true.

"Brevity is the soul of wit," says Polonius in Hamlet.

Leonardo da Vinci: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works, creator of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, coined "KISS," which helped defense industry people, my people, who think in acronyms, to remember to "keep it," variously, "short," "simple," "stupid."

My favorite is from Lotus founder Colin Chapman who exhorted his designers to "Simplify, and add lightness." Adding horsepower improves speed in the straightaway, he reasoned, but shedding bulk adds nimbleness for every situation.

People prefer brevity for many reasons. The mind, dictates nature, can absorb only so much as the bladder can endure. Replace "bladder" with "butt" and this truism applies very broadly. Speech is inherently boring. The human mouth talks at 100 to 140 words per minute but the ear listens at 600 to 700. When the buffer empties the brain grows frustrated.

Packing more content into fewer words requires investment, ironically, of time.

"Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte," wrote French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1657, "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Younger, Cato, Cicero, Bill Clinton, and Benjamin Franklin are all credited with saying "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Any of those attributions could have been true. With the possible exception of Bill Clinton.

Fortunately an investment in “short” pays big dividends. Here’s an example:

By June 1991 we had reached the hard part in our campaign to sell 64 F/A-18 Hornet strike fighters to the Finnish Air Force. Throughout the Cold War the government had balanced their buys between the Soviet bloc and the West to protect Finland’s neutrality, but in a private meeting held the previous year the Finnish government's top leaders had decided to buy their new fighters from the West. We got the word on a note scribbled secretly on a cocktail napkin by our Helsinki representative, and we knew this development would make our more capable and costly airplane affordable. We were in the fight.

We flew to Helsinki that winter to pick up the request for proposal and I will not soon forget getting naked in the sauna with the defense procurement chief and his senior (male!) colleagues. But that's another story...

The Finnish military is a serious and professional force toughened by hostile meteorological and political conditions and very present memory of the brutal Winter War of 1939-40. Our fighter’s far superior war-fighting power mattered, and by spring 1991 the Finnish Air Force was going for the Hornet. (We thought, incidentally, that we were losing. The Finns had intentionally convinced us we were behind as they reassured trailing competitors that they were actually winning. They correctly believed this strategy would extract the best deal from us.)

So we were very excited to receive an urgent call from Finnish Air Force HQ inviting us to deliver a presentation at the Paris Air Show to the statuesque and courageous Finnish Defense Minister Elizabeth Rehn, her defense procurement chief, the head of industrial policy and the Air Force commander, outlining why we thought they should pick our fighters. This would be a tough decision for them, the largest amount of money their government had ever spent on any single decision.

Our viewgraph (remember those?) generating apparatus went to DEFCON ONE. This would be the mother of all military “briefings” and emphatically not brief. We had a great deal of information that we were convinced we must tell them. Many trees died as we generated draft after draft.

To his everlasting credit, when our Finnish representative discovered what was happening he forcefully intervened. Minister Rehn wanted answers to exactly six tough questions, and he demanded the barest of presentations lasting no more than thirty minutes. Any longer, he said, and we would lose their attention and probably the multi-billion dollar program.

So we invested the six weeks remaining in what became six viewgraphs and a 20-minute pitch that would leave 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Somebody pointed out that this talk would be worth about $130M per minute. I rehearsed and rehearsed, more than once in front of a mirror.

The Finnish delegation arrived spot on time at our modest Le Bourget chalet. Introductions were quickly exchanged and everybody sat down. The talk took exactly 20 minutes. There were two questions with some discussion. And at the 30-minute mark Minister Rehn stood up, thanked us for our time, and the delegation disappeared.

We second-guessed ourselves nearly every day after that. Should we have extended the time and said more? What had we omitted that we would regret?

I will never know how much that short speech influenced the ultimate result. But we did what the customer needed and kept it short.

We won.