The word “elegant” suggests many images: diamonds, fashion, art, certain people. But you generally don’t conjure up anything related to management. Yet there is an art to the management of ideas and the people who create them, and thus a role for elegance.

Everything elegant is simple; not everything simple is elegant. That’s because there are two kinds of simplicity. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful.

The goal of elegance is to maximize effect with minimum means. It’s an elusive target. Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers search for theories that explain highly complex phenomena in simple ways. Artists use white, or “negative,” space to convey visual power. Musicians and composers use silence to create dramatic tension. Physicians try to find a single diagnosis to explain all of a patient’s symptoms, shaving the analysis down to the simplest explanation.

For today’s manager, the key to understanding its relevance lies in realizing that value, for customers and employees alike, may best be added, paradoxically, through a primarily subtractive process. As Jim Collins wrote in 2003, “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit—to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life.”

What helps is to have a framework for applying three important design principles—symmetry, seduction, and subtraction—for these are critical elements of elegance.

Symmetry: Simple rules create effective order Most people think about symmetry in terms of a mirror reflection, which is a visual left-right balance. But that’s just one example of a kind of symmetry, of which there are many. In fact, most of the natural world is symmetrical, characterized by infinitely repeating patterns. So