I just finished reading a great book called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. (Larry Prusak has just written about this book, too.) The essays in this book are on different themes, from hand washing to battlefield care in Iraq, cystic fibrosis to polio outbreaks. The theme that shines through, however, reminds me of something that I’ve heard Jeff Pfeffer say many times: Great organizations, especially those that do well over the long haul, are masters of the obvious and the mundane.

Gawande shows how nearly 100,000 Americans die each year from diseases that they catch in hospitals: If doctors and nurses would wash their hands more frequently, this number would fall. He shows how relentless attention to this little detail helps distinguish the best hospitals from average ones.

Gawande also shows how small attention to detail can reduce battlefield injuries. These often-exhausted doctors and nurses are serious about keeping great records so that they can learn how to save more lives from patterns in the evidence. Even after hours of grueling surgery, the norm is that battlefield doctors record the nature of the injuries they are seeing. This attention to evidence has big payoffs. One pattern they uncovered was that soldiers and marines were getting a lot of eye injuries. They asked their patients why they weren’t wearing their protective eye coverings. The answer was that the design was bad. They didn’t want to look like dorks! The goggles were redesigned to look like cool sunglasses, and the eye injury rate went down. This is also a great example of why you need to ask users about problems with products. You might learn something.

To return to my colleague and friend Jeff Pfeffer, this pattern is consistent with what we discovered as we were writing Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. Great leaders and firms often “win” by doing mundane things well. Think of Southwest Airline's Chairman and Founder's Herb Kelleher saying “Airplanes don’t make any money when they are sitting on the ground.” Or of George Zimmer, CEO and Founder of The Men’s Wearhouse, building a business model around the notion that most of his customers would rather not actually be in his stores buying suits. Wal-Mart Founder Sam Walton’s motto, “everyday low prices,” may have had some controversial effects, but is a simple idea that shapes many, many actions at the discount giant. It was essential to its becoming the biggest retailer in the world.

Similarly, research on what leads to effectiveness says that the answer with the biggest impact is often absurdly simple at first glance. For example, the most powerful personality variable for predicting performance is conscientiousness. Does the person usually do what he or she commits to do? Is he or she reliable and hardworking? When you look at research on decision making in meetings, a fascinating set of studies suggests that if you have people stand up rather than sit down, the meetings run about 35 percent shorter without any loss of decision quality. So: Hire people who do what they say, and don’t let them sit down!

Although breakthrough innovations do happen now and then, and I am all for innovation, our view is that even in those cases, it is the meticulous implementation of a good idea-–rather than just having a great idea itself-–that matters for success. This is why Jeff and I like to say the best organizations know the right thing to do, and then do it.

That's easy to say, maybe even obvious, but hard to do. What "obvious" advice can you share?

HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS:
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management