 |
 A while ago, the CEO of a power tool company
with declining sales asked his sales people this question. The answers were what you might
expect—price, service, packaging, availability and even warranty coverage. And they
spawned suggestions about how to improve the company in each of those areas.
But the real answer is that people buy drills to make holes. With
that realization, the company was able to solve its sales problems.
Most of us can identify “problems” and come up
with “solutions.” But often we see only the obvious, or rely on tradition
to help us discover the solutions. More often, the real solution lies hidden because we
just can’t get out of our comfort zones to see the “gifts” and discoveries
problems bring.
Richard Bach once wrote, “there is no such thing as a
problem without a gift in its hands.”
In this issue of Real Answers, we offer you a look at some of
those “gifts.”
Jerry Ehrlich, for example, faced the problem of creating a
different kind of trailer manufacturing company—Wabash National Corporation. Lee
Butler’s solution to the problem of managing $12 million dollars of tires on the
ground has helped make FFE Trans-portation Services into an unusual, profitable fleet. And
when our customers told us about the problems of tire life on spread axle trailers, our
engineers viewed the request as a gift that led to the new R196 trailer tire.
We also said that we’d deal with questions you’ve sent
us to answer—your gift to us. This issue, we examine how to minimize problems of
non-concentric mounting. And how to diagnose, anticipate and reduce the problems of
irregular wear. Our gifts to you.
Finally, there’s a company that discovered a huge market by
providing tires for “classic and antique” vehicles.
Let’s face it, most of our life involves the process of
searching for solutions. At times, those solutions are obvious. Most of the time, they
play “hide and seek” with us, often handing us those little “gifts” as
clues for our search. If we view them as gifts and discover the real solutions, the real
answers—we end up discovering new dimensions of opportunity.
After all, if we do things the way we’ve always done them,
we’ll get what we always got.
(And the power tool company might have gone out of business.) |
|
|
| << close >> |
|
|
|
