➡️ In 2009, a Stanford professor gave their entrepreneurship class a task.

➡️ The students were split up into different teams  
➡️ Each team was given five dollars in funding
➡️ Each team was given two hours for the task

💡 Make as much money as possible

✅ After the two hours, they would have to give a then give a 3 minutes presentation about how they had generated an ROI.


➡️ Here’s what happened:

🥉 Many students thought about using the $5 to buy materials for a car wash or lemonade stand or just gambling the $5 and buying a lottery ticket. Whilst others had ideas to buy and sell goods.
 
▪️ Their returns were pretty poor.


🥈 The teams that realized the $5 was a distraction concentrated on what they could do with no money within two hours.  

✅ One of the most successful teams agreed to make reservations at popular restaurants and then sell those reservations to people who wanted to skip the queue.

◾️ Their returns were pretty good, around 4000%


🏅🏆 The team that made the most money approached the problem totally differently. 
✅ They realized that the $5 funding and the 2-hours were just 2 of three assets they had been given. 
✅ They identified the most valuable asset at their disposal was a 3-minute presentation slot with a captive audience of Stanford students. 
✅ They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students. 

⬛️ They sold the slot for $650 an ROI of 12900%

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💡 The task illustrates the importance of strategy and tactics. 

➡️ Strategies are plans for achieving goals.

➡️ Putting the strategy into action requires tactics.

Sun Tzu wrote, “Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.”


🌟 It is an essential reminder to all of us that we should never be blinded by the tools we think we have. We need to get away, zoom out and examine everything in our toolbox to build a different strategy and walk away from flawed tactics.


For the ❤️ of startups