Most of us are familiar with the mini-entrepreneurial endeavor known as the lemonade stand. Growing up I tried to make it big many times with the lemonade stand. Once I even tried selling my parents' clothes (without their permission of course) as a new "product offering". I've thought a lot recently about the complexity of business and of business strategy and I wonder what would happen if we took a step back and simplified our strategies to "lemonade stand" clarity, focusing on the things that really matter.

I attended a presentation this week about "The Lean Startup", a framework borrowed from manufacturing that has been adapted to the technology startup industry in recent years. The lean startup framework particularly strikes a chord with me because lean thinking and its siamese-twin, the Toyota Production System, are the foundation of my current work as a process improvement specialist. It is fascinating for me to see the foundational principles of lean thinking and TPS creating great gains in other industries. These principles are SIMPLE AS LEMONADE: start with the customer, respect your people, go and see, eliminate waste, stop to fix problems, don't pass defects downstream, and more.

When, where, and how does effective simplicity turn to wasteful complexity in our modern business world? How can we get back to the basics and find the competitive advantage that waits there? I have designed this blog as a catch-basin for my research and experiments around this topic. My goal is to find and highlight business strategies that are "simple as lemonade"-- strategies that are simple, basic, and provide a powerful competitive advantage.