A+ Problems
Peter Thiel forced every employee at PayPal to focus on exactly one task. This simple rule completely eliminated internal competition for responsibilities. More importantly, it forced people to tackle A+ problems—high-impact challenges that are often procrastinated due to their difficulty. Employees had to bang their heads against the wall until they found a breakthrough, instead of settling for easier work.
Steve Jobs applied this exact same logic at Apple. His team was experimenting with new screen technology for a tablet. Multi-touch input was going to be the future. But Jobs realized this invention could solve a much bigger problem for their phone project. He completely paused the tablet development to focus all his best engineers on the phone first. “If it worked on a phone, I knew we could go back and use it on a tablet,” Jobs said.