I know I’ve been teasing this a lot on the radio, and we’re just over a week away from the release of my new book, The Right Problems. I’ve written quite a few books in the past, and I thought they were all very good for the times in which they were written. But there’s a particular urgency I feel with this one, especially as someone who has run for president and has learned so much about how and why problems in this country are addressed – or not addressed, as the case may be.
So I stepped back and considered: The reason I ran for president in the first place was because I believed the experience I gained and the lessons I learned in my business career could be put to very good use solving the problems of the country. I was asked to take on some pretty challenging turnaround situations, including the Philadelphia region of Burger King and the entire Godfather’s Pizza company. One of the first things I learned in those situations is that you might find 100 problems, but you can’t fix 100 problems all at once.
So what you have to do is work on the
right problems, by which I mean: The really powerful leverage points that, once solved, will clear the way for other problems to be solved much more easily. Here’s an example: Let’s say a company has a problem with employee absenteeism. Do you try to “solve” employee absenteeism as a problem unto itself? It may be that it’s the symptom of a more fundamental problem with your hiring policies, or with your training policies. Solve the bigger problem, and the symptom of absenteeism mostly goes away.
An experienced and skilled CEO will focus on the big, fundamental problem because solving it solves a lot of other problems too. A less skilled CEO will obsess over the symptoms and not understand what’s causing them.
Most politicians don’t get this at all, so they spend way too much time focusing on the wrong problems, while making little or no progress toward solutions to the right problems. What I’ve done in the new book is identify the nine right problems the nation needs to be about solving right now. Five of them are “easy” in the sense that the problem is 100 percent bad policy, so changing the policy solves the problem. The other four are much more difficult because they are the result of years of bad policy, and they’ve become so troublesome that merely changing the policies that caused them won’t solve the problem. There is a lot more work to do, which is why we have to start now.
Am I going to tell you what the nine right problems are? Well, I do want to sell books! But we’ll be talking a lot about the content of the book here on
HermanCain.com, on our Facebook page and on the Herman Cain Show, so I’m not just going to be a big tease! (Maybe a little one.)
By the way, people are already pre-ordering the book.
By the case! That’s how badly people want real solutions to the right problems. I’d love to give you the chance to be one of the first to order it as well. We need to solve these problems more urgently than ever, and the electorate needs to be letting politicians know that
these are the issues that should be their priorities.
Let's do this together, and in the process create a lot more intelligent thinkers!
