Rules for safety issues are critical. Rules created to ensure transparency are vital. Any other rules tend to inhibit our customers and people. They reduce customer options, they restrict peoples ideas and create boundaries that don’t add any value.

Instead, unnecessary rules increase complexity in a world crying out for simplicity and freedom of choice. Often they are designed to control, keep people in check and assert where the ‘real’ power supposedly is, the organisation/business.

A recent visit for a meeting to a hotel could not have amplified this better. A ‘telling off’ on leaving for holding a two-hour meeting for four people in the lounge area was an outstanding example for sheer arrogance. Of course, we should have booked a training room for half a day (the minimum time allowed), and at an exorbitant cost, how stupid we were!

The real question they should have been asking themselves was why all the lights we on in a room with large windows, on one of the sunniest days in the UK. Hey ho, you can’t win them all.

All companies have evolved and shaped rules over time. Some of them will be essential; a lot will be completely unnecessary. Going over the main rules in your company and asking the question, does this rule control or facilitate added value to our customers and staff isn’t too bigger deal and it could really change your emphasis and perspective.