Addition by Subtraction Works

A good definition of marketing is, “Find out what they want and give them more of
it. Find out what they don’t want and give them less of it.” Good planners give
them more of it. Very few spend any time at all giving them less of it.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with generating lots of alternatives. It’s fun. The
brainstorming principle of “There’s no such thing as a bad idea” is valid during the
meeting. The trouble is that once a new idea, or direction, automatically makes
someone’s to do list, it takes on a life of its own. It gets stuck in the flypaper and it
keeps on buzzing. The truth is that most ideas are lousy.

The real villain of trying to do too much isn’t brainstorming. It’s Benjamin
Franklin. He hung a perpetual guilt trip on us by boasting, “Every day I very way I
get better and better.” That’s fine for an average Renaissance Man, but a more useful admonition for the rest of us would have been, “Every day I will cut out one
irrelevancy.”

There’s a handy way to develop the “Only the Best” method for planning. Borrow a
trick from statistics. Use the “Null Hypothesis,” which assumes that there is no
correlation between two functions: they don’t need each other. The burden of proof
is on he who thinks that another idea is a necessary extension of the base product.

So the Null Hypothesis asks, “Must this be done? Can’t we do without it?” The
“keeper ideas” will rise to the top.

Some clichés are hard to refute---

• It’s harder to write a short letter than a long one
• It’s hard to write a simple plans
• It’s hard to stick to your guns
• It’s hard to dance with the one who brought you