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All profits support the ‘Eddie & Elizabeth Thomas Scholarship Fund’.

My parent’s dream was to give us the gift of higher education. I created this fund in their honour to support disadvantaged students in pursuit of the same dream.

The book was in part inspired by the late Stephen Hawking who said ‘the 21st Century will be the century of complexity, and how we handle it will define us.’

Unsurprisingly, Stephen Hawking was correct. Due to the world’s obsession with growth, we have forgotten about efficiency and productivity. Technology makes it so easy to add more to our systems and processes, we have caught the disease of addition.

The growth in technology over the last few decades has been accompanied by growth in management. As we add to our systems, we increase the need for the management of the systems. In turn, the governance and administration of these systems is enabled by the addition of more technology, and we have created a contagion: a contagion of complexity.

This book aims to explain what can be done right now to unravel the self-inflicted complexity of the knowledge age. The book provides examples of how the principles of simplicity can be applied in each aspect of a company.

It is a fictional tale about a wonderful young lady who experiences a journey from complexity towards simplicity. Along the way she encounters many characters that anybody who has worked in industry will recognise. Hopefully, such readers will relate to the difficulties of dealing with these people.

Readers may also relate to the unintended complexity that results from the well-meaning but misguided, cognitive biases that grip today’s industry.

Every fable has a moral. We could express this one as “Any fool can add.”