Kevin Cullis: How to Start a Business Mac Version

As an entrepreneur using a Mac I’m always looking for solutions to problems. But before you can get to the solution, you have to correctly define the problem. Here’s a list of where you can go wrong in descending order of importance:

1. Right Problem, Right Way
2. Right Problem, Wrong Way
3. Wrong Problem, Right Way
4. Wrong Problem, Wrong Way

In my book, “How to Start a Business: Mac Version” I wrote on page 44 in chapter three, “Starting your quest with an accurate problem statement from your customer’s perspective is essential to keeping on track. Einstein is quoted as saying he would spend ‘fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution’ if he had one hour to save the world.”

And another quote, “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved. John Dewey.”

You first have to accurately and correctly identify the problem. Then, you have to have a right solution to fix it, i.e. the right way. The right way means not providing a bandaid to the solution, such as throwing money at the problem, because it still may not solve it.

Here’s another view of “getting stuff done” by entrepreneurs that includes HOW entrepreneurs problem solve:

• Ready, ready, ready – never get out of the problem definition phase.
• Ready, aim, aim, aim- defined the problem, but can’t find a target to hit.
• Ready, aim, fire – just the right amount of effort to solve the problem
• Ready, fire, aim – just blindly aims at something hoping to fix it, not necessarily a bad thing.
• Fire, aim, ready – no thinking about the problem at all, blindly doing something.

There’s a reason why you follow the ready, aim, fire process:

• Ready means you prepare for what you intend to do, define the problem correctly.
• Aim means you find the right target it shoot at, select a process to fix the problem.
• Fire means you execute your previous two steps with all alacrity, do it.

If you fail to “hit the target” you have to find out why in all three steps above.

Here’s a quick way of helping find the correct problem to fix: Ask Five Whys.

Ask “Why” five times to find the “Root Cause” of a problem.