I was listening to a podcast while driving over the Thanksgiving holiday. The author (Yuval Noah Harari) framed politics in a way I’ve never thought about before. The disagreement isn’t how we solve issues—it’s really about what we think is worth solving. That one sentence has made me look at the world as one huge resource allocation exercise.

We are a creative, motivated, and intelligent species; we can solve just about anything we put our collective minds to. The issue is we have a hard time agreeing on what’s worth solving. I think about this when I see the disparity of homelessness here in San Francisco, an area of the world that is generating wealth at an unprecedented rate yet has lots of people living on the streets. We are working really hard to solve the self-driving car challenge; not so much on the homeless challenge.

What challenges are worth solving in your print business? Where are you making your investments of time, effort, and money to solve? How do we best decide on the challenges to solve because clearly there are more challenges than we have time or money to solve. In one printer we worked with, their prepress department was very vocal about needing help and wanting automation. Because they were assertive, they got the attention and focus of both our team and the software vendors who provide prepress automation. Much later in the engagement the owner said in passing, “We have one person in prepress. I can’t get rid of that one person. He doesn’t seem to be overworked so I don’t see why there is anything worth automating there.” Now you could argue that if you don’t automate, you’ll prevent growth but what if there are other areas of his business that were already choking off growth? Make sure you’re solving the most important challenges of your business because we are all working with limited resources (time and money).