When you are trying to improve your business, how do you decide which problem to work on first?

• Do you work on the one that annoys you the most?
• Do you work on the one creates the most frequent fires?
• Do you work on the one that you secretly most enjoy working on?

Today's topic is problem solving. But I'm bringing it to you with a twist.

We're not going to discuss problem solving tools and techniques. Many forests have died giving their life to supply the thousands of pages written about problem solving techniques. If you are interested in that topic, search the internet or log on to Amazon.com. You will find hundreds of articles, books and seminars on the topic of how to solve problems.

No, today we are going to explore a much rarer and more important problem solving issue: how to choose the right problem to solve. It's not as easy as you think.

A very dear, brilliant friend of mine, a retired professor from the University of Kansas' School of Business, spent more than 30 years studying how businesses and non-profit organizations improve themselves.

His research revealed a startling fact:
Managers rarely choose the right problem to solve!

More often than not, the management teams he researched actually came up with great solutions to the problems they worked on. Unfortunately, those problems had no bearing on the overall performance of their companies.