In The Haystack Syndrome, which I thought I was done discussing, Goldratt presents a production and marketing problem with a less-than-intuitive solution:
If you read much Goldratt, you know he’s always talking about constraints, which is a clue to how to solve the problem — it’s a thinly disguised linear programming problem.
In this day and age, solving linear programming problems is remarkably easy — if you know how to formulate the problem for Excel’s Solver add-in. This Google spreadsheet lays out the basic problem, but Google hasn’t built a Solver analog into it’s spreadsheet tool just yet.