Having spent the last two years cutting my teeth in the Toronto tech entrepreneur scene, I've come to experience a lot of what I call a "if it isn't broken, don

Having spent the last two years cutting my teeth in the Toronto tech entrepreneur scene, I've come to experience a lot of what I call a "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality, which tends to discount visionary thinking. Specifically, the standard form for a Toronto tech start-up pitch is to identify "the bleeding neck wound" that some large group of customers have (usually enterprises - bonus points if they are a bank!), and then explain how your solution will come in and save the day for them. This is what Weissman refers to as a "Problem/Solution" story in "Presenting to Win". This is all well and good, as a hammer without a nail is not much use to anybody, but someone with an actual bleeding neck wound will tell you (if they had the mental clarity) that they are not too concerned about tomorrow, next week, or next year - all consciousness is wrapped up around solving the (admittedly very important!) problem at hand. The issue is that the scene fixates on this form of storytelling to the exclusion of all others. I was trying to make this point to a member of the Toronto business community the other day by rhetorically asking what bleeding neck wound the iPad solved; the person told me with a straight face that mobile device screens were too small and that laptops were too heavy. The "build it and they will come" visionary thinking that brought about order-of-magnitude improvements in the way things are done (the automobile, the personal computer, the Internet) is simply, and sorely, lacking in Toronto.