Kiss is the acronym for the motto above, and my wish for the Year of the Monkey is that people and organizations would pay more attention to making things simpler, NOT more difficult. That is: easy to understand without having to be member of a "pack".

Most especially, ratings and comparisons should relate to a scale of 100 for easy comprehension.

My American friends seem to be perpetually keen to invent odd scales, odd comparisons and odd labels which usually require a book of explanation as to the real meaning.

Take the security alerts relating to threatening terrorist attacks. I heard on the news that the security alert level in the US has been increased to an "Orange" alert. Orange? Why Orange, why complicate things? Why not just call it: Emergency Alert, High Alert, or Medium Alert or Low Alert and safer or even better, relate the danger to a scale of 100 (Emergency Alert) then 80 for High Alert, 60 for Medium and so on.

The 1-to-100 scale has the advantage that it can be finely tuned too, should there be people who, with mathematical accuracy, have calculated that the danger lurking is 86.5 on a scale of 100.

Napoleon Bonaparte started to metricate the world in the early 1800s. Two hundred years later, the US still has problems in following the rest of the world.

CCTV-9 is my channel of knowledge about China and a lot of the interviews with visiting experts and foreign politicians are first rate and illuminating.

Recently, the Beijing representative of Standard and Poor's, a financial rating agency, was interviewed. We were told that China's sovereign credit rating in the world was AA, meaning not bad. Croatia's was BB+, Germany's AAA and Paraguay's CCC.

The scale, we were told, ranges from triple A (the best) to AA "plus" then AA, AA "minus", A "plus", A "minus" and so to B and C, in all about 18 grades. Pffffffttttttt

My goodness, what a mess!

All this abracadabra makes one chunder. Why, for goodness sake, not a simple scale from 1 to 100 with 100 the top and zero is junk status. All this AB plus and minus requires a table of explanation, it clouds the issue and is unhelpful.

Many schools too have jumped onto the ABC bandwagon. Where previously attainment was expressed on a scale of 100 or 10, the authorities are now awarding A for the best) and D for the worst. And, yes, some have additional pluses and minuses to mystify the beholder.

Why? To confuse the issue? To seem more "with" it?

The argument is, I believe, that many achievements cannot be related to a numerical scale but this is exactly what all these Ab pluses and minuses are doing.

A scale of 100 or expressions as a percentage is a great help in interpreting anything.

Whenever I get a set of company accounts across my desk, I rarely look first at the absolute numbers. I first want to see the percentages of all items and if these are not provided, I have them prepared. This way, variations are easy to pick , especially when previous sets of accounts are also replete with percentages.

Having been presented with percentages of income and expenditure items, revenue, profit and loss, asset increases or decreases, unusual items etc, it is easy to pull the emergency brake. Absolute numbers are usually hard to interpret and analyse. Percentages make it easy.

Would the world be not a better place for all if organisations and S&P and people would KISS more and dump their AB pluses into the rubbish bin?

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