As a team exercise, you are given $10 and told to turn that into as much money as you can in a month. What would you do?
I used to give my management and marketing class (Year 10s) this challenge in their first lesson, and see what they would come up with. They’d be given some basic rules (no gambling, no begging, nothing illegal or immoral) and they’d have to work as a team to come up with a hypothetical solution. I wouldn’t actually give them $10 and they wouldn’t have to go through with it.
I’d sit back and watch. Some formed teams quite well, a natural leader emerged. A few ideas were thrown around, tested and they quite quickly came up with a few that needed further exploring. Some groups saw it as an easy ‘doss’ lesson, sat back and did little. The noise rose. Other flicked pencils. It was quite different to how they’d been used to be taught, and they probably thought I was a little bit wacko.
I checked in from time to time, circulated around the groups, but other than that pretty much let them get on with it. For a double lesson a week they could work on this, plus some homework, and after 4 weeks they had to prepare their written plan, and a presentation with visual aids. They could decide who did the writing, who did the speaking, who did the visuals. In their other weekly lessons I taught some skills that might be useful, but did not make the link too blatant. The brightest realised I was helping them along, some others thought this was a proper lesson and took notes, but did not apply it to the $10 challenge.
When the day for presentations arrived, the groups that had slacked off relied on bravado and ad libbing to get them through. Their presentations were faulty, minimal, there was little thought and they mainly limbered along to an end, usually well before time. The others that had taken it more seriously went through some of the possible solutions, before building up a case for their best options. I gave a trophy to the best solution.
I did not care which solution they came up with, it was more the process I was interested in. From it, I could see their beginning level on leadership, team work, resourcing, budgetting, planning, risk taking, scenario planning, costs and benefit analysis, culture … pretty much anything relating to business and management really. During the year, the exercise became a rich vein of examples to refer back to. Later, some would tell me, ‘I wish I’d taken that more seriously, Mr G.’ Right.
I was at another one of those innovation breakfasts the other day (it is the topic du jour after all) and I heard Shaun Gregory (Senior Vice President at Woodside) talk about a similar $10 challenge given to final year Stanford University students. ‘Turn $10 into as much as you can in a month, and come back and tell us how much you made and how.’
One group bought a few bike pumps and pumped up student bikes for money around campus, and had made $100 or so by the time of the presentations. Smart. Industrious. 10x return (less labour costs.)
Another took reservations in popular Silicon Valley restaurants and then sold these off for money to the highest bidders. They did not even spend their $10, but had a few hundred dollars by the end of it. Clever.
The winning group thought quite laterally. They sold off their own presentation spot to the company that wanted to present to the Stanford Uni graduating students. Top Valley companies compete for the best and brightest talent, and pay huge fees to research companies, sign on bonuses and countless internal hours in search. Here was a golden chance to pitch their business to the elite grads. The winning company paid many thousands for the chance.
We don’t even need to teach entrepreneurship to 15 year olds (or even under grads), we just need to give them the opportunity to have a go. We need to tell them it’s OK to have a go, to fail, to set up a company, to try to solve a problem, to look at things differently. We learn by doing. We need to say it’s OK to have the aspiration to be a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber or a singer or a social worker or a teacher, but also an entrepreneur. We need to celebrate entrepreneurship and success. Those that have a go. Those that take a quantified risk.
Here’s a final thought. If the $10 was ‘your life’, how are you going to make the most of it…?
