STRATEGY vs. TACTIC
STRATEGY vs TACTIC: The STANFORD $5 CHALLENGE Most Stanford students fail this challenge. Here's what we can learn from their mistakes. You’re a student in a Stanford class on entrepreneurship. Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team five dollars in funding. Your goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved. If you’re a student in the class, what would you do? Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table. But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bring up the rear in the class. The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource. So they ignore it. Instead, the
