SEE, SOLVE, SCALE: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success...exactly what it says, it is

SEE, SOLVE, SCALE: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success
DANNY WARSHAY
St. Martin's Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by Brown University’s beloved course—The Entrepreneurial Process—Danny Warshay’s See, Solve, Scale is a proven and paradigm-shifting method to unlocking the power of entrepreneurship.

The Entrepreneurial Process, one of Brown University’s highest-rated courses, has empowered thousands of students to start their own ventures. You might assume these ventures started because the founders were born entrepreneurs. You might assume that these folks had technical or finance degrees, or worked at fancy consulting firms, or had some other specialized knowledge. Yet that isn’t the case. Entrepreneurship is not a spirit or a gift. It is a process that anyone can learn, and that anyone can use to turn a problem into a solution with impact.

In See, Solve, Scale, Danny Warshay, the creator of the Entrepreneurial Process course and founding Executive Director of Brown’s Center for Entrepreneurship, shares the same set of tools with aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. He overturns the common misconception that entrepreneurship is a hard-wired trait or the sole province of high-flying MBAs, and provides a proven method to identify consequential problems and an accessible process anyone can learn, master, and apply to solve them.

Combining real-world experience backed by surprising research-based insights, See, Solve, Scale guides the reader through forming a successful startup team and through the three steps of the process: find and validate a problem, develop an initial small-scale solution, and scale a long-term solution. It also details eleven common errors of judgment that entrepreneurs make when they rely on their intuition and provides instruction for how to avoid them.

Leveraging Warshay’s own entrepreneurship successes and his 15 years of experience teaching liberal arts students, See, Solve, Scale debunks common myths about entrepreneurship and empowers everyone, especially those who other entrepreneurship books have ignored and left behind. Its lasting message: Anyone can take a world-changing idea from conception to breakthrough entrepreneurial success.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The best, measured by their own success metrics, entrepreneurs are the same kind of people who become cultural anthropologists. They are more interested in what you have to say than in putting forth their own ideas. They are deeply curious about things, lots of things, and like asking questions designed to elicit explanations not simply answers. They like building on those explanations, fixing those unfulfilled needs, by getting the needy in contact with needed commodity.

This is a radical departure from the existing models of entrepreneurship. These focus on the item to be sold and thus focus on salesmanship, on taking A Widget and getting together the right talents and teams to make it. Think Shark Tank. It's a hit-and-miss process...it depends on selling selling selling, on creating a need where none might've been before.

Warshay says the best results come from starting at the end of the traditional process: Identifying the need that a widget satisfies. He requires his students to form teams, which is already a huge lesson in observing, asking questions, and solving issues; the teams must then identify an issue (See) that they can imagine a way to improve, to add value to (Solve), and then create a structure to both implement the solution and make it replicable for others (Scale).

So, you know what it says, now you can go do it, right? Ummm...no.

The value Warshay adds in his course at Brown University, of course, is access to his extensive knowledge base in person and the presence of other motivated and creative people on one's own level. The book is a great way to pick up many ideas, and Warshay is as generous with his experience as he is with his expertise. The case analysis of failures is as valuable as the rah-rah of support and cheerleading. (I contend it's actually more valuable, but I'm a cynical old party.) What Warshay's written version of the course has over the lived experience of it is, one: cost...a $30-ish book purchase is a lot less than a Brown University course...two: time, as in "read in your own." Some of us aren't great at sprints like a class represents. Some of us aren't able to thrive in the distracting atmosphere of competing ideas and purposes. A book is a great way to determine for one's self if a technique will work for us, our own special needs and conditions of life.

There are, inevitabaly, downsides to reading a book about a dynamic thing like developing one's innate entrepreneurial methodology. Those multivarious points of view? Distracting, perhaps; but urgently needed to avoid making the echo-chamber error. (Look at the great failures in History, eg: Napoleon, Hitler; they heard no dissent, brooked no argument; they Were Right. A faster road to failure I do not know of.) And let's not forget that other people have other social networks. The social aspect of entrepreneurship isn't to be underestimated. There need to be converts and believers to get any action from plan to performance, no matter how many or few, no matter what is needed from them or required of them.

There's a major disconnect for me in Warshay's insistence, at the very beginning of the book, that no pre-existing resources are needed for entrepreneurs to begin their journey. I contend that these social networks and the luxury of time to spend developing their skills are resources, and the glibness to sell others on a vision isn't exactly something everyone just *has*. The book does the work of developing whatever innate abilities one has a disservice by not acknowledging it as a precious resource, and one that not everyone possesses.

Since, however, the book and the course it's based on exist as a means of doing that developing, I suppose it's simply so basal to the ability to benefit from it that Warshay doesn't feel it needs belaboring.

One thing Warshay addresses (but doesn't belabor, either) is that the contents of the book can be applied within existing businesses or organizations. This strikes me as something that is supremely valuable in the post-COVID economy. One's role in an existing business might not be the same now as it was three years ago. What better moment to introduce something major and unexpected than this one? And this is the resource that can make that vague idea you've had since 1999 a reality at last.

A business doesn't need two people with the same ideas. So be the one with a new idea. Read this book, apply its precepts, and survive the layoffs. Or read this book, realize your idea is workable but can't be done while wage-slaving, and find the path to the door. It's never the wrong time to bet on yourself and your own creativity.

Parents with college undergrads or recent graduates could do a lot worse than give them a copy of this book (graduation season being close upon us); those with younger kids, high-schoolers let's say, could do worse than let them in on the way professors, later on bosses, will be looking at them and the yardsticks those seniors will use to measure them.

If there's been an employment gap in your life, this $30 might be more than you can splash out...but the library can, and will, help out there! This isn't some self-published marvy by a distinctly second-rank creator. This is a major-publisher product, well made and vetted by generations of successful and satisfied students. If it's not already on the library's acquisitions list, recommend the purchase to them. No one can know about every single book that's coming out. Who knows but what you might find yourself wreathed in glory for suggesting something that will help many.

The overall point I'm making is: Read it; try it out; and don't wait any longer to make a move to get your vision made manifest.