Clarity propels an organization. Not occasional clarity but pervasive, twenty-four-hour, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners clarity. Most people never perceive that this is lacking in their organization, but 90 percent of the time it is. Just open a few random emails on your company account, activate your brutal-vision, and read. The muddying messages are rampant.

If people were brutally honest in their emails, the time we spend sorting through our in-boxes would surely decrease by half.

It’s when things are left unresolved that people spend too much of their time looking over their shoulders instead of looking ahead. That’s when complexity creeps in. In Apple’s simplified approach to product management, set in place by Steve Jobs, such extraneous issues didn’t get much of a chance to distract.