For problems outside your core business, hire specialists. For challenges that drive your unique value, invest in educating your team to own them. The difference determines how you allocate resources and where you actually compete.
Do you want education or delegation? Over at StateChange, we do education a lot, but people come over, they have their hardest 5%, and sometimes people come in and what they really want is, will somebody just solve this problem for me? And I have total sympathy for that. You're going to find that's actually a pretty good way to proceed for a number of hard problems that are outside of your domain. You just hire an expert who's able to solve that problem for you, and then you move on. Because while the problem might be hard, it's not core to your business. You should permit that to exist. There are services out there from which you can hire experts to do that kind of thing. I've even done that kind of thing every once in a while. But for the things that are going to be in the core of your business, things that are going to drive your differentiating value to the client, that's where you're going to want to have education and bring the knowledge into what you're doing with your company. So knowing which kind of help you're looking for, which problems, is going to, I think, drive the bus for you in a way that drives a lot of value.
