Venti Half Caf Sugar-Free Soy Milk Cappucino Extra Froth Double Espresso

I was meeting with a few of my company's leadership this morning at Starbucks. We, like so many companies, are working through how to tell the world about who we are, what we do and why we do it.

Our current challenge has been how to say just enough; to take the pages and pages of processes and nuances and boil them down into a sentence or two.

No one really cares (initially) how we make magic happen. They just want to know that we do. So why do we throw open the firehose when someone asks "what do you do?" or encounters a piece of our collateral?

We're in the process of simplifying. We've bought into the say more with less mentality. So, back to Starbucks. As we're working through this process, my attention drifted to the people a few feet away. One after another stepping up to order their morning Joe.

One Venti Half Caf Sugar-Free Soy Milk Cappucino Extra Froth Double Espresso after another. One with a quarter splash of this or 6.4 tsp of that; a hair of gnewt. When did such complexity become the norm?

Think about it. What happens to our audience when we tell the "Venti Half Caf Sugar-Free Soy Milk Cappucino Extra Froth Double Espresso" version of our message? Do we lose them? Maybe? Do we set an expectation that the relationship will be an involved, potentially cumbersome one? Probably. 

So as we think about our how we share ourselves and our passions - for our jobs, for Active 20-30 and even for the organizations we serve through them - how do we keep things simple?

Please share your tricks in the comments.