The really big challenges don’t have a silver bullet.

When presented with a challenge, a common response is to look for the quick out. If your organization has a technical scaling challenge, you look to bring in a database expert. If your business has a sales challenge, you find a rock-star sales guy to turn it around.

Chances are pretty good that your “answer”, your “silver bullet” won’t be sufficient.

Instead, tackle the challenge head-on. Look to create a culture designed around fixing the problem. If you are having troubles scaling, make every engineer load-test their own features, have a weekly reading group on design of high-performance systems. Make the whole company accountable for the challenge. If you are struggling with sales, make everyone a sales-person. Change your whole product direction to one that “sells itself”.

Don’t just hire one expert to solve the problem, and for heaven’s sake, don’t keep gravitating towards the stuff that’s easy while continuing to ignore the challenges.