Willie Sutton, bank robber and writer, supposedly quipped when Mitch Ohnstad, a reporter asked him why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is”.

In Sutton’s autobiography, he denied saying that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was, but he did say that he enjoyed robbing banks. It is estimated that he stole upwards to two million dollars from more than 100 banks over four decades starting in the 1920s.

His quaint response that he didn’t utter, has evolved into a rule of thumb for medical students now known as Sutton’s Law. It’s an instruction for medical students, and practitioners to accept the most likely diagnosis rather than spending inordinate amounts of time and money exploring all possible answers.

In accounting, a variant to Sutton’s Law is used to find savings in a budget, stating that the biggest savings will be found where the greatest costs occur.

Along a similar path of logic Occam’s Razor, attributed to the 14^th century Englishman, William Ockham, states that when confronted with competing hypotheses to any given set of data one should select the least complicated proposition or as it is usually stated “The simplest explanation is usually the best one.”

Adding it all up leads one to the KISS Principle: Keep It Simple Stupid, first formulated by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

Source: Sutton, Where the Money Was: Memoirs of a Bank Robber, 1976. Kaplan et al, Harvard BS, 1998, MSN, Wikipedia. Graphic: Sutton, DOJ, public domain.