Occam’s razor at work doesn’t say that you should simplify all the way to one. It says you should do everything possible to cull activities—the fewest metrics, the fewest goals, the fewest steps, the fewest pieces of sushi—while retaining everything necessary to do great work. As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observed, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”28
This is similar to von Moltke's description of an order or what the Marines now call a "mission order."
"The rule to follow is that an order should contain all, but also only, what subordinates cannot determine for themselves to achieve a particular purpose."
