My kids have a subject which i did not have before. it is called Math PS ( Problem Solving) .  I think it is a great subject, and actually this should be one of the subjects an Entrepreneur should master. It is a skill about finding the unknown by trying to understand which of the known will lead to the solving of the problem.

In real life, and in business, you don’t know all the answers.  It is important therefore to understand by what process you try to get to the known. Most business plans are like that — after all, you would not know how much exactly is your projected sales, or projected expenses.  Thus, based on known factors, you assume.  I had always said that a business plan is only as good as its assumptions.

Thus, it is important that you study your assumptions, or methods carefully — because no amount of study can make up for  bad assumptions.  Therefore a good entrepreneur must be somebody who by nature or talent, knows how to connect the dots — to the right answer.
On my entrepreneurial class, we debated on the general popular question that Microsoft ask on its applicants — how many gasoline stations are there in the United States? 

The person is not supposed to know, and of course, it is possible that the answers can be searched through the internet.  But let us supposed you can only research other facts, and therefore, what is more important or emphasized, is that knowing other things, how would you arrive at the answer?

There were many methods that were shared, and I took the liberty of dividing the answers to those which were unlikely,and most likely to make the right answers:

Unlikely ( or somewhat impractical ways, or inaccurate ways to come up with the answer).

1. Count the number of cities ( and try to put in a good guess of how many stations are there in each city) and thus come out with the answer.  NOTE: the answer could not be accurate because cities are of different sizes, and what about the towns?

2. Go to Google maps, and count the number of stations.  LIttle bit impractical. Will need lots of work, and very laborious way to find the answer.  However, some people do tend to take the long ardous way.

3. Try to get the total area of the United States, and speculate that each x amount of square miles has one gasoline station.  This is not unlikely since some places can have easily five gasoline stations within 4 blocks of each other, while some places might not have a gasoline station for several hundred miles at a stretch.

Likely:

1. Get the total number of population and assume that there must be a gasoline station for x amount of household or population.

2. Get the total number of cars, and assume that a car will go to a gasoline station once a week, and a gasoline station can only serve x amount of cars a day, and therefore, there must be x amount of gasoline stations.
3. Get the total number of gallons of gasoline sold per day in the United States, and assume that each gasoline station has an average sale of x amount of gallons ( although some gasoline stations can easily have double or triple the sale of others), and thus come out with the number of stations.

Again, there are no right or wrong answers, but the methodology to arriving at the answer is important. In here, you will see that if you choose an unlikely track, it will not get you a good answer irregardless of how will you do it.  On the other hand, if you make the correct assumption, the process becomes much better at predicting the right answers.

How good are you in seeing the relationships of things?  When you are able to spot a good cause and effect, it will increase your chances of being able to spot trends, and predict what would happen — a more accurate process of arriving to certainty.   And I believe that is what makes a good entrepreneur.

What do you think?