The Art of the Soluble

Medawar, a Nobel-winning biologist, argues that good science is not about tackling the hardest problems but about choosing the ones that can actually be solved with the tools available — the art is in the picking. The book collects essays on scientific method, Karl Popper, and the rhetoric of scientific writing, written with the literary polish of someone who took prose as seriously as biology. For product direction the central insight transfers directly: shipping in most organisations is a function of choosing soluble problems and sequencing them, not of heroic effort on insoluble ones. Medawar would have been an unusually sharp product director. A book to read slowly.