Art Williams uses Prudential's 176-page rate book to show how the insurance industry buries itself in complexity. As companies grow, they become bureaucratic and unwieldy. To compete, large firms need to deliberately simplify.
Next, to get that edge, we had to simplify the complicated. When you get as big as Starbucks, as an example, it's just a— it's like a bureaucracy. It's just, you know, it's just a— it just gets out of control. And the life insurance industry was a million times bigger than Starbucks, and we had to find a way to simplify how complicated they made it. Let me give you an example. This is Prudential's rate book. If you look at it, it's 176 pages. It's an inch thick.
