There’s a lot in it that I agree with and would probably give the same advice to companies I was advising. A common mantra in the startup world is that you should fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Imagine speaking with people and their feedback is, yeah, go ahead and solve that for me—this is a big problem. When asked to provide a missing vision statement, it’s often during deliberations that the team discovers they aren’t all on the same page regarding the problem they’re trying to solve. Ask yourself: What is the difference between using any of those things today compared to the first time I used it? By “actionable” he meant “we’ll never be able to get people to use it enough to make it worth our while financially or to change their route accordingly.Positive deviance has of course been around for a while in the development sector, following its successful implementation in fighting malnutrition in Vietnam.

Defining the problem - often overlooked but crucial for finding appropriate solutions to challenges.If the job is adequately getting done, that’s bad news for you because it’s hard to displace an existing solution with a similar-sounding value proposition. One thing I particularly appreciated about the book was Levine's emphasis on the role of empathy in entrepreneurship. This multiplies the impact of failure because you apply so little of that experience on your next endeavor.

As he bent down to pick them off, something stirred in his brain, and he kept the burrs in his pocket to examine under a microscope. The following is an excerpt from “ Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution“ copyright © 2023 by Uri Levine. Find one of those and try to come up with solutions for it (these problems can also be your organizational problems by the way). but after reading the book and applying it to circumstances I've been in professionally with other founders, I can definitely say it is highly recommended reading if you're in the business of business.

In their paper Identifying Viable ‘Need-Solution Pairs’: Problem Solving Without Problem Formulation, MIT Professors Eric Von Hippel and Georg von Grogh demonstrate that, far from being uncommon, this is actually quite a common occurrence. While I stopped trying to convince him, I nevertheless carried the urge to work on this project for a while until, around a year later (it always takes longer than you would think), as a result of my background and my reputation as an advisor to start-ups, I was introduced by a mutual colleague to two entrepreneurs, Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinar. If you follow this path, and your solution eventually works, you will be creating value, which is the essence of your journey. Uri has a special gift of synthesizing complex models into easy to understand language, separating the wheat from the chaff and delivering the bottom line on a silver platter.