The cost is of course highly variable. It depends on the company’s current product and/or service portfolio, its size, the diversity of its market, the intricacies of the existing business procedures, the efficiency of the IT systems and, most importantly, the company culture. The range of those parameters makes it unrealistic to produce a “de-complexification tariff”. What may be taken for granted is that the cost of de-complexifying a business is in proportion with the benefits that can be reaped from this exercise as long as the organization accepts to play by the rules of the Strategic Simplification approach. If a business is overly complex it will obviously be more costly to de-complexify but this will also bring in more savings.

The measure of the benefits is unfortunately not algorithmic and therefore not accessible to purely quantitative assessment methods. The only tool that we have to evaluate its impacts and results is by surveying the executives and the personnel of the organization having undergone Strategic Simplification. This business endeavor is never the only thing that happens at any one time in the life of an organization. During the course of a de-complexification engagement the business environment can improve or deteriorate, the resources of the organization can change and many other things can happen. As anyone knows it is not possible to measure the effect of one parameter on a complex system while other parameters are also changing. We are therefore left with qualitative appreciation, not quantitative measurements.

In all intellectual honesty, no, not any more than it is possible to compute the R.O.I. of a large IT investment. Some consultants claim to be able to do so but this is self-deception. Improvements are both qualitative (e.g. the relationships between functions and departments, the smoothness of the work processes, the stress level for key functions, the contacts with customers, etc.) and quantitative (products and/or service profitability, delivery time, overhead costs, etc.). Moreover the effect is not static (i.e. frozen in time) but dynamic (i.e. it reflects an evolution in time). Valorizing qualitative improvements is always a highly arbitrary exercise with little convincing value if any. The whole exercise looses much of its interest and credibility when qualitative and quantitative aspects have similar importance.

If you cater for specific and complex needs, you ought to know your customers well. Everything comes at a cost. The question is always how close to Pareto efficiency do you want to be and how much are your customers ready to pay for your moving away from that optimum. We are well aware that Strategic Simplification is not relevant for a few markets like the luxury market, the safety and security market or for health-related products or services. IT Cortex has the ethics not to embark on a project with a weak or irrelevant business case. Besides those markets it usually makes perfect business sense to streamline products and services in order to achieve Pareto efficiency.

The markets that are not price sensitive are typically the luxury market, the safety and security market as well as the health market. In those markets building a brand is what ultimately matters. The luxury market is primarily "ego-driven" and rationality plays little in purchase decisions. Security related markets play on the fact that physical integrity or health have no price (although they have a cost). The brand to build should therefore be geared toward emphasizing those aspects in those markets. However brand building does not lean itself on intricate and sophisticated concepts but on a few (two or three) salient features or characteristics. That's where Strategic Simplification can play a role: focus on the essential.

Not necessarily. The pruning of "Pareto-inefficient" activities, can be coupled with quality improvement, diversification and business growth in other related market segments. Resources that are being made redundant by eliminating the "trivial many" activities can be assigned on the "vital few" activities in a connected business market in which the company diversifies itself. Moreover a brand comes out stronger of a de-complexification exercise as it improves the focus of the sales.

As a rule of theumb the first two steps of our methodology (diagnostics, and operation streamlining) are never proposed as turnkey projects given the scope uncertainty pertaining to those stages. However, once the precise scoping of the de-complexification project is signed-off and once the resources within the company are properly mobilized then a turnkey de-complexification project can be signed (fixed price, fixed duration). One nevertheless needs to be aware that an external company like IT Cortex can only play an advisory role, not a decision-making role. The outcome of the project, in terms of overall profitability gains, will ultimately be function of the extent to which the company plays by the rules of the Strategic Simplification approach.

The primary condition is that the top management fully supports the project and thoroughly understands the stakes of the initiative. Once that absolute p^rerequisite is met one needs to The rest is “simply” a matter of selecting the right partner and playing by the rules of the methodology. One needs to be aware that the effort to de-complexify a business is collective. It is shared by all functions within the company. It is not simply a matter of empowering a consultant to fulfill a mission or of externalizing a collective responsibility. It is a question of surrendering specificities to come closer to Pareto efficiency.

No. Whatever paradoxical this might sound anyone knowledgeable in complexity sciences loves simplicity. Complex systems are by essence issued from simple interactions between a very large number of components or agents. Those simple interactions give rise to an emerging global behavior that transcends the local or individual interaction rules. Complexity sciences consist in studying the conditions – the “metalaws” - under which simple interactions between many elements translate themselves into global behavior. Examples of complex behavior emerging out of simple interactions are vortexes, thermodynamic curiosities like the Benard cells or the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction, the brain, ants or termites colonies, artificial life development, neural networks, etc. Similarly, simple interactions – i.e. simple business rules – can give rise to efficient and sophisticated business operations whereas intricate rules can drag an organization into inefficiency. Complicated rules imposed top-down decreases the efficiency of an organization by concomitantly bloating its overhead. Simple bottom-up initiatives improve overall efficiency and work out incoherences in a "natural" manner. The key lesson taught to us by complexity sciences is the creative power of interactions governed by simple laws and between multiple agents.

From a high level perspective one can classify those approaches into two main categories :

• those aiming at equipping oneself with a paraphernalia of tools and methods in the hope of managing the intricacies set by the multiple constraints imposed both internally (e.g. internal approval procedures) and externally (e.g. GDPR) on the organization.
• the ones that target Pareto-efficiency by pruning the constraints set by the "trivial many" on activities, processes, rules and controls.

Traditional consulting is all about the first approach whereas Strategic simplification is about the second approach. By essence this second approach is the one that maximizes the efficiency at creating customer value and therefore also, ultimately, at creating shareholder's value.

What matters are the customers the conglomerate serves and how they serve them. There is no counter-indication to being a conglomerate as long as the "trivial many" do not get attention in the product or service portfolio and in the internal working of the organization.