Problems and More Problems

I've heard it said before that because business's cannot actually pleasure themselves they hold meetings instead. It could be said that meetings are a huge waste of time but I think it could also be said that anything that is classically viewed as "business" is a huge waste of time. Today we will look at problem solving and business needs.

1) Problem Solving

Seth talks today about how business's would rather talk about the solutions than the problems. This concept is extremely damming because on so many levels we realize the benefits today of talking about the solutions and yet we do not have a solution, we simply have a problem.

Let's say you are Serg and I am Larry sitting in our garage talking about how to monetize a web search engine into a billion dollar profit for us. We talk about what cool stuff we can buy with that billion. We talk about how people are going to love us because if people give you a billion dollars they must love you. We work and work and work on this problem, how can we monetize. We put our giant brains together and yet we are still sitting in a garage without a billion dollars. Flip this and take the problem they were solving, fixing and perfecting search engine algorithms, and then realize that the solve came when the problem was solved.

One of my favorite things I've learned in starting a few small ventures is that forcasting is a business term for guessing mixed with hope. I'm guessing about what will happen in something that does not exist and now entails my entire life (thus the inevitable sprinkling of hope). The number one reason it is guessing however, is simply that we do not know what will happen and we have no track record. Taking this to problem solving, if you have solved this problem before than there is no meeting happening about it. If you have not encountered this problem yet then by talking about solutions you are guessing and probably hoping. Don't guess and hope makes a better woman's name than business strategy.

2) Problems Themselves

Taking the new perspective we now have on problem solving we scan over an article Guy wrote about marketing to teens and at the end he throws in this absolute nugget of insight:

"The lesson is that it doesn’t matter what a company “needs;” it only matter what customers are willing to do."

This should cause us to stop everything we are doing and realize that how we decide what problems are may be a problem in and of itself. Let us say that we are all sitting around the big oak table at twitter and talking about the solve to our no monitazation issue. We talk about how cool it will be when we turn each user into a dollar of profit per month, we will all instantly become millionaires, talk talk talk. The issue is that we are not even truly defining what the problem is and therefore, guessing at solutions, but we are also not discussing what the customers are willing to do. Customers are not willing to pay for twitter and thus we are discussing a solution to an undefined problem that has its roots in something completely seperate.

So how about your business, job, church, non-profit, sports team? What are your problems? What are your customers willing to do? Do those lineup? If not, that is your real problem.