Business Insight Zone

The page on which Fermat scribbled about his Last Theorem.

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What are the most important problems you face in your business?

Not necessarily the most urgent. Not necessarily the most complicated — or the most obvious — but the most important problems. What are they?

A while back I talked about the “Hilbert Problems” of business: the huge, permanent, pervasive issues that are attacked by big-idea business thinkers like Ram Charan, Michael Porter, and the late Peter Drucker.

Questions like “How do we deal with the unlimited availability of information?” fascinate me, and I use this blog to help me think through them in concrete ways that relate to our daily working lives. But each of us should define our own Big Problems of business — the ones affect us from day to day and year to year as we try to grow our businesses and build our careers.

These are the problems that matter to you not because (or not only because) they’re interesting to think about in the abstract, but because you have a real burning need to figure them out for the sake of your commercial standing.

Take a Cue from Prof. Feynman

The mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, who taught at MIT for many years, had the opportunity to observe the working methods of Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in physics. Here’s what Rota said about him:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

(This passage comes from Prof. Rota’s lecture, “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” which is well worth reading even if you don’t work in academia.)

The Challenge to Us Both

My challenge to you — one that I’m taking up myself — is this: Come up with a specific list of YOUR big problems. Think through the persistent issues you face in terms of . . .

• your company
• your clients
• your career
• your industry
• your profession

Jot down at least one or two Big Problems in each category. Think them through, rephrase them better, sleep on them. Then jot them down again on an index card that you can carry in your pocket. Return to them regularly, and look for lessons that apply to them as you go through your working life.

No matter how hectic your day gets, give at least a few minutes each day to thinking through your Big Problems.

Feel free to share your results — I’ll do the same.

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Related posts:

• Commit to having better problems in 2009.
• What are the “Hilbert Problems” of business?

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The image is of the page of Diophantus upon which Fermat made the marginal notation known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. Source: Wikipedia.

Category: Management, The business brain