The sickness of convolution

The more time I spend in advertising and working across a number of companies and number of brands in all kinds of sectors, the more I notice that what I previously thought to be an exclusive trait of the finance industry, is prevalent everywhere.

The trait I speak of is convolution. The near compulsive need for larger companies to make things as complicated and needlessly incomprehensible as possible, and more times than not, to their own detriment.

Finance and insurance have been doing it for eons. They drown their customers in complete gibberish they call "disclosure". They have far too many products with far too many variances, so that it becomes impossible to compare one to the next. Just think back to the last time you had to sign up for health insurance and the horrible process that can be.

Is it really necessary that for a corporate to turn a profit, they need to remove any resemblance of logic and clarity from their products, services, and business structure?

I've found that most of these giants cannot even grasp an understanding of themselves internally, let alone have any hope of conveying their structure and flow to an outsider. And yet most of them, when asked "If you could be any other brand, who would you most want to be", inevitably answer with 'Apple' or 'Google' or the like.

These companies want to be like Apple, yet seem completely incapable of comprehending some of the core philosophies that companies like Apple and Google are built on. Usually a mix of strive, simplicity, and customer centricity.

Instead, we continue to be offered a hundred different financial instruments from out financial provider, each only able to marginally effect your return, and essentially identical. We are charged different rates on our usage of wireless data, for no logical reason other than some product manager inside a telco decided to bundle it one way, and another a different way altogether.

Some people try to blame "shareholders" and the return they are expecting, yet Apple, Google, Disney, Nike, are all listed companies. They provide their shareholders with value that most corporates can only dream of. Not because they are risk adverse, but because they take the risks. They are willing to provide their customers with simple and effective offerings. They trust their customers instead of despising them.

I can only hope that perhaps in the retirement days of the Schmidt's and Jobs' of the world, they will take the time to sit down and articulate their philosophies into books. Perhaps we might even start to see a new movement in corporate culture.

A cure to this horrendous sickness of convolution, and the development of a corporate simplicity culture.