Describing the problem, volume two

I talked the other day about the importance of spending more time describing the problem.

How you describe the problem determines, in large part, how you solve it. Remember the Einstein quote, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

For you movie buffs out there, there’s a great scene about this in the movie “Moneyball,” where Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) is trying to tell Grady that the way he thinks about the problem is not going to lead to a solution:

By the way, this is where you rock the world of your buyer. This is where you make him/her think, “Oh my god, I need this person around.”

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