The challenge in which most Stanford Student Fail. Here’s what we can take out from their blunders.
You’re a student during a Stanford class on entrepreneurship.
Your professor walks into space, breaks the category into different teams, and provides each team five dollars in funding. Your goal is to form the maximum amount of money as possible within two hours then provide a three-minute presentation to the category about what you achieved.
If you are a student within the class, what would you do?
Typical answers range from using the five dollars to shop for start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand to purchasing a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table.
But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to mention the rear within the class.
The teams that make the foremost money don’t use the five dollars in the least. They realize the five dollars may be a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource.
So they ignore it. Instead, they are going back to the first principles and begin from scratch. They reframe the matter more broadly as “What can we do to form money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants then selling the reservation times to people who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated a powerful few hundred dollars in only two hours.
But the team that made the foremost money approached the matter differently. They realized that both the $5 funding and therefore the 2-hour period weren’t the foremost valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the foremost valuable resource was the three-minute presentation time that they had ahead of a captivated Stanford class. They sold their three-minute slot to a corporation curious about recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650.
The five-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they ask different concepts. A strategy may be a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy.
The Stanford students who bombed the $5 challenge fixated on a tactic — the thanks to using the five dollars — and lost sight of the strategy. If we focus too closely on the tactic, we become enthusiastic thereto. “Tactics without a strategy,” as Sun Tzu wrote within the Art of War, “are the noise before defeat.”
Just because a $5 bill is sitting ahead of you doesn’t suggest it is the right tool for the work. Tools, as Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.” When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities within the peripheries. It’s only you zoom out and determine the broader strategy that you simply can walk off from a flawed tactic.
What is the $5 tactic in your own life? How are you able to ignore it and find the 2-hour window? Or even better, how does one find the foremost valuable three minutes in your arsenal?
Once you progress from the “what” to the “why” — once you frame the matter broadly in terms of what you’re trying to try to do rather than your favored solution — you’ll discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight.
