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An easy way to solve a problem is to have someone else solve it first. You just have to find that person. Customers are a regular source of solutions. Businesses watch their customers to see how they use and misuse products. In particular, looking at the way customers misuse a product can suggest a new problem along with a solution.

For example, spray-on cooking oils, such as PAM, were designed to prevent food from sticking to a pan. Apparently some customers were also using the spray on the bottom of lawn mowers — to prevent the cut grass from sticking to the blades and bottom of the mower. Thus we have a new problem (sticky lawn mower blades) along with a solution (spray-on oil). Improving the improvised solution is easy; the spray doesn't need to be virgin olive oil or even oil fit for human consumption.

The point of this approach is to have the customer provide you with both an unrecognized problem and an accompanying solution. The easiest way to solve a problem is to take someone's existing but ad hoc solution and regularize it. Why try to come up with an original idea when someone else has already done the hard work for you?

Although watching customers offers valuable, even invaluable, insights, it isn't the whole game. There are many solutions you'd miss if that's all you did. You might have watched the wrong customer. Or the typical customer might not find it worthwhile or even possible to solve the problem on his or her own.

Thus we want to suggest an approach to watching customers that is less expensive and more expansive: Watch what a hypothetical customer would do. Since the customer is imaginary, this approach brings the costs way down. To encourage expansive thinking, we give our hypothetical customer extremely large resources — if there is a solution to the problem, this person can find it. In short, we ask, What would Croesus do?

Getting Started
Croesus is our stand-in for an individual with nearly unlimited resources. Just to be clear, we don't suggest actually asking Bill Gates or some other superwealthy individual. We ask our imaginary Croesus. Our hypothetical Croesus is richer and smarter than the real one. By asking this question, we too become smarter and richer.

The first step is to think about what a person with vast resources — connections, money or time — would do to solve the problem.

When you come up with an answer, you're not done. You know that a solution exists, but the problem with Croesus's answer is that it will be too expensive to be practical. Turning the Croesus solution into something practical still requires a good deal of effort. Is there a way to automate or standardize the custom solution? Who could play the role of a personal assistant? To make the Croesus solution practical, we look for what we could call the 99/1 rule. (Normally, it's an 80/20 rule, but with Croesus, the costs are so high that you aim for 99 percent of the benefits for 1 percent of the cost.)

Practice Exercise: The Unwanted Call
Let's visit the nighttime wrong-number problem using this approach. We asked a group of executives how Donald Trump would prevent being disturbed at night by a wrong number. The immediate answer was that he'd have someone to answer his phone twenty-four hours a day. If the call were a wrong number or a fax machine, his assistant, not he, would deal with the problem. This is the first step: answering the question of "What would Croesus do?" (WWCD).

The second step is to think of ways to make this solution more affordable. How could we standardize or automate the services of a personal assistant? Calls could be directed to an answering service. Most doctors use this approach, but it's still too expensive to be a general solution.

Could the screening be done by a machine? One option is to create a list of approved numbers that would be able to get through. While this solves most of the problem, it would be a good deal of work to compile a list of approved numbers. You would always worry that the list would be incomplete.

An alternative to the approved list is the use of a code. Preferred callers could be given a code to input to get the phone to ring through. But making phone calls could get a bit complicated when every phone number also has a code.

Think for a moment about these two machine-screening approaches. The approved-number list creates a screen at the receiving end, whereas the code pushes the screen out to the caller. The caller has the advantage of being smarter than a machine. Make the code something obvious, like "0." If we just give the caller the right information, the person can use discretion. Thus we return to the message: "You've reached the Trumps. We're home but don't wish to be disturbed right now. If this is an emergency, you can hit "0" and our phone will ring. But it had better be good."

The first part of the message prevents wrong numbers. The second part allows the caller to self-screen. Perhaps the irony of this solution is that, while it would be 99 percent effective for most of us, it wouldn't work very well work for the Trumps. (This solution would also work for cell phones, especially in New York City, where an ordinance prohibits cell phone calls during public performances except for emergencies.)

The telephone example helps illustrate the WWCD solution process. Asking WWCD pushes you to think expansively. One reason why WWCD works is that, for many types of problems, it just isn't worth it for a single individual to solve the larger problem. The cost of one person's developing the solution is too great compared to the potential benefits. That's why you won't get the answer by watching customers, as it isn't in any one customer's interest to find an answer. But our imaginary King Croesus would.

Some solutions can't be found if you focus on how customers behave. That's because the solution may require changing someone else's behavior. Seeing that customers unplug their phones or turn the ringer down reveals the problem, but not the solution of getting callers to behave differently. Customers are only one part of the puzzle. WWCD encourages you to look at the whole picture.

There is another, perhaps psychological, benefit of the Croesus approach. Simply knowing that a solution exists is helpful in giving you confidence to explore alternatives. While it is easy to give up and say that it can't be done, putting yourself in the King Croesus position makes it easier to imagine that a solution can be found. Adapting, modifying, standardizing and automating a WWCD answer is often easier than coming up with the solution from scratch.

The Supplier as Your Personal Assistant
Tired of choosing which cell phone calling plan is best for you? The choices are confusing (even for Ph.D. economists). A typical plan will advertise 300 prime-time minutes for $29.95 a month plus 1,000 minutes evenings and weekends. While it seems as though the cost is less than 10 cents a minute, it never works out that way. Minutes above 300 are charged at 35 cents each, and unused minutes are lost forever. A quick simulation with a 30 percent month-by-month variation shows that the real cost is closer to 25 cents per minute — and that's if you pick just the right plan.

Why make the choice? Let someone else figure this out for you. In particular, let the cell phone company figure this out. At the end of the year, the company could look back at your calling pattern and pick the plan that would have been best for you.

Never happen? This is done today in Germany for electricity. Customers are retroactively put in the plan that would have been the cheapest, given their usage. This system also provides a reward for loyalty; if you leave before the end of the year, you aren't retroactively placed into the best plan.

In some circumstances, the supplier isn't in the best position to be your personal assistant. For example, which long-distance carrier should you pick? Here, you could give your phone business to a third party whose job it is to pick the best plan for you.

Going one step further, why pick the best plan on a monthly basis? Why not pick the best deal on a call-by-call basis? Some businesses do this today using what is called least-cost routing. Essentially, each phone call is put out to bid, and whoever will carry the call for the lowest price gets the business. Although one call might go over AT&T and another would be carried by Sprint, you would still get a single, aggregated bill.

Pursuing this approach has a further benefit for consumers. Today, when Sprint lowers its rates, it has to spend money to advertise. Sprint doesn't expect to get the entire market, even if it has the cheapest price. With least-cost routing in place, if Sprint has the lowest price, it gets all the calls without having to advertise. This arrangement gives Sprint (and its rivals) a great incentive to offer a lower price. Consumers clearly win. Even the long-distance carriers can do okay, as they can save a good deal of the costs associated with marketing and customer acquisition.

Watching how consumers with limited resources come up with low-tech solutions and innovative applications is a valuable tool for routinizing ingenuity. But WWCD allows us to imagine how consumers with very few limits behave. And imagining can lead us toward solutions that we never would have thought of when focusing on the limits rather than on the possibilities.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. Excerpted from Why Not? How To Use Everyday Ingenuity To Solve Problems Big And Small. Copyright 2003, by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres; All Rights Reserved.

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