Insights from Daniel Burrus, technology forecaster, corporate consultant, and bestselling business author whose six books include Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible (HarperBusiness, 2011). This Quick Hits article covers one of the seven principles Burrus outlines in Flash Foresight — take your biggest problem and skip it.
“The idea here is that whatever problem you think you’ve got right now, that’s not it. You’re working on the wrong one. The only way you can find the right one is to free yourself of the wrong one, and to do that you’ve got to peel it back like an onion.
Here’s a quick business example. A number of years ago I was working with Eli Lily. Their top executives told me, ‘we have a major problem. We have to hire about 2,000 additional Ph.D. researchers and we don’t have the budget for it.’
I knew that wasn’t the actual problem, so I started to peel the onion back to get to the core by asking the question, why — why do you need to hire 2,000 researchers? 
They said, as a drug company our stock price is in direct proportion to how many new drugs we have in the pipeline. To get new drugs in the pipeline we have to solve molecular problems. To solve molecular problems we need researchers, and right now we figure we need at least 2,000 additional researchers to solve all the molecular problems we need to solve to get new drugs in the pipeline and get our stock price up.
I told them, let’s get those researchers then. What they ended up doing was posting their molecular problems on the Internet saying, ‘We pay for solutions.’ Today thousands and thousands and thousands of researchers all over the world are submitting solutions to their molecular problems, and Eli Lily buys the solutions they want.
Let’s go back to the initial problem. Was the problem that they didn’t have a budget to hire 2,000 researchers? No. The problem was that they had molecular problems to solve — and they didn’t have to do it by hiring researchers.
The point I’m getting at is, hey, you’re smart, right? If you still have a problem you can’t solve, the bigger it is the more likely it is you’re focusing on the wrong problem.”
For an exclusive in-depth discussion with Daniel Burrus, see TRENDLINES: Why Survival Mode Won’t Help You Survive; and, Get Out of the Price Competitive Rat Race