Brutal Simplicity of Thought
This book started life as a training manual for all M&C Saatchi employees.
Written by Maurice Saatchi, its approach shaped the ad team’s ways of working for 40 years. Its principles permeate the culture, philosophy and structure of some of the best known corporate brands.
Brutal Simplicity of Thought, brutally reveals the weaknesses, and strengths, of brutal simplicity of thought. The book is a compilation of some 50 ideas, claimed to be brutally simple ideas, which it argues have changed the world.
In his introduction Maurice Saatchi says ‘Simplicity is a test… It forces exactitude or it annihilates.’ The book’s website adds: ‘Simple ideas enter the brain quicker and stay there longer.’ The opening of that sentence must surely be true, but I’m not sure about the ending. Still, it is an attractive notion.
Each example asks a provocative question, such as: ‘How did two wheels emancipate women?’ And answers that a brutally simple thought – in this case the bicycle – did the trick. Some of the examples are quite entertaining (Q: How do you keep your private parts private? A: A zip). Others would make excellent pub-quiz questions (Q: How did an Irish Pointer discover Velcro? A: An engineer called George de Mestral spotted burdock seeds getting caught in his dog’s coat, and hey presto! Velcro