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There was a video -- I think a TED talk, but I could be wrong -- linked from HN some time ago, demonstrating some clever (though perhaps evil) out-of-the-box th
by gjm11 17y ago
There was a video -- I think a TED talk, but I could be wrong -- linked from HN some time ago, demonstrating some clever (though perhaps evil) out-of-the-box thinking on this question.
Someone was teaching a class of business students, and set them the challenge: you have $10 and 48 hours; make as much money as you can. Afterwards, each team got to stand up in front of everyone else and say what they did.
The team that got the most money did so by completely ignoring the $10. They approached some local business and said "How much will you pay us for a 5-minute advertising slot in front of a roomful of future business leaders?". Then they used their presentation slot to plug that business, and collected a nice big pile of money for doing it.
EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105 ; I got a couple of unimportant details wrong.
- jhancock 17y agoI like this kids competition better. The Stanford competition was "won" by a team that cheated. They didn't just ignore the $10, they violated the time constraint. my comment from the Stanford thread: "From my perspective, they made nothing from their two hours. The money was made by the 3 minutes in class which was not part of their 2 hour earning time." Either the "winning" Stanford team used their two hours for lining up the ad sale or executing it: the two actions did not occur in the same two hour window. If they want to count the "lining up the deal" window, then they made nothing as there was no delivery of the ad in that time frame. If they want to count the execution of the ad, well, they wouldn't have had a paying advertiser.