The Principle of Diminutive Additives

The Principle of Diminutive Additives^TM

The principle of diminutive additives is very simple:  Little things add up.  This principle, important in explaining all manner of things that happen in our lives was discovered, well really just named, by me (Rich Borglum) in about 1985.

5000 little drops of rain can make you very wet.  If you start out the day with a temperature of 65 degrees and 20 little degrees start running away one at a time, you will be cold at the end of day. 

If you eat just 100 extra calories every day, you will gain a lot of weight over a period of a few years.  If you save just a dollar a day, at 5 percent annual interest, at the end of 30 years you will have $24,967.

If you save just 20 seconds on a manufacturing operation, you will save 33 minutes while processing only 100 pieces.  That is 26.4 hours when doing only 4800 parts.  Do you still think little things don’t add up??

Or let’s go on our ten minute break, but add just a couple of minutes to each one.  If we have 30 people each working 250 days  --- that is 7500 total “people days.”  At four minutes a day for each “people day”, that is 30,000 minutes, which is 500 hours a year. 

When you go home tonight, if you have a traffic signal on your route, think about this.  If every driver shaves just a little bit off the light what will happen.  You start one or two seconds early on your green and that gal on your left stops just one or two seconds late on her red, where are you going to be?  T-Boned that’s where.  Little things add up.  (12 miles an hour equals 17.6 feet per second)

Look around you  --- at home, on the job, or the next time you are “out and about”.  What examples of diminutive additives can you see.

Simplification is the most complicated process(TM)

It is easy to design a product or a process that works, at least in relative terms.  The same goes for writing almost anything.

But the real trick is to make it simple and still have full functionality and effectiveness.  In short, simplification is the most complicated (part of the) process.

For some people it comes more easily than for others.  Training and experience usually improve a person's ability to make things simple.

Whether you are writing advertising copy or designing a new product, making it simple is important.  Rachel was VP (& Director of Sales & Marketing) at Richway for a number of years and would sometimes spend literally hours getting just the right words in the proper places for a media ad or a brochure.  (Other times things flowed pretty easily, but she always spent time over several days to perfect her "copy")   I often told people that they need to have the same level of concern whether they are writing advertising or a letter to a customer.  

The same thing applies to product design.  A number of times we designed a product and put it into production, only to decide later that we could make it more simple without compromising performance.  We are not alone.  I often see the same thing as new models of a product emerge.

Simplicity is elegant!!      Simplification is the most complicated process.

I wrote this piece pretty quickly.  It will probably have a few changes made after I hit  "publish".

changes ..2



BTW, I trademarked this phrase a number of years ago when I made a wall sign that said just that. In writing this post I "googled" the phrase and guess what----  Somebody named "San Pedro" decided to use it as his own in August of 2012.  click here to go to the website    See below.

global.zinio.com/sitemap/Men-magazines/Metro...2012/.../pg-147
“One of the things I've learned from my mentors is that simplification is the most complicated process,” says San Pedro. “You can make a piece so bongga, but ...


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What They Don't See Counts

In the early 1980's, Mike Pint served as our service manager on a part time basis.  He was a full time firefighter in a nearby city, with a rotating shift.

Most of our products had a switchbox with a cover attached with four screws.  Every time Mike had a switchbox apart for service he would make sure the slots of the four screws were exactly aligned horizontally.  He would tell everyone nearby that "the customer may not see that the screws are lined up, but he will know it."  Mike would remind us that those little things tell a customer that he is getting a quality product and that we care about him.

I learned a lot from Mike and he helped shape our quality conscious culture.

Squarely aligning shipping labels and carefulness of sealing tape application can telegraph some notion of product quality even before the customer opens a box. Then the proper alingment of decals on the product itself sends another message.  The customer may not really "see" it, but "it counts."

The John Deere tractor manufacturing factory is only a few miles from us.  In the early 1980's I was told by a supplier to both Deere and some of the car manufacturers that Deere was more concerned about fit and finish than US car makers.  This became obvious in the reputation for quality (or non-quality) both had over the next twenty or more years, when "Detroit" began to catch up to their Japanese competitors (and Deere) in quality.


You can apply the concept of "what they don't see"  to anything.

My friend Paul is an executive chef and consultant in the restaurant industry in Florida.  He points out that the little things that you may not actively see in a restaurant can shape your opinion as much as the taste of the food itself.  Incidently he confirms that whatever you do see in the restroom is usually what you would see if you got to look in the kitchen. (If the restroom is dirty, Paul suggests that you may not want to eat in that restaurant.)

Nobody Ever Taught Me That

There are lots of things that nobody ever teaches you.  Instead you just have to be smart enough to learn them yourself.  Probably all the signals are there, but it is up to you to organize them and teach yourself whatever it is the signals are telling you.

This requires not just intelligence, but also a desire to learn about something or another.  You have to stop and think and want to make sense of  your world, to organize it and recognize a pattern so that next time you see or experience a similar pattern you can have some idea of what is coming next. 

It is like riding a bicycle,  only by doing can you know when you are in danger of tipping over.  Only then can you know where "the edge" is at.

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great  and numerous other books, once said: "The right people don't need to be managed.  If you need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake."  In the same vein, if someone needs to be taught everything, you have the wrong person.

Time and time again I have seen the people who were most successful at Richway constantly "teaching themselves" something new on an almost daily basis.  I always talked about giving people a "long rope" at Richway.  They could either "hang themselves" or have a great time and "swing high".  Being able to teach themselves was an important part of using the long rope to their advantage.


It has been said that the class clown can make the best salesman because he learns just how far he can push people .... he learns how to read them  (fellow students and teachers) better than the next guy, because he is always pushing the boundary of humor vs getting in real trouble.  He learns to quickly read where the "edge" is at with a given person in a given situation.   He can put this ability to his advantage in the process of selling.  He has to learn this himself.  Nobody can teach it to him.  The two best salesmen that I know both admit to having been class clowns. 

So it is in life and in business.  Nobody can teach you a lot of things.  You have to find them out for yourself by doing and experiencing.