6 ms·

See, the problem here is that she hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. 1. Used a device to measure the

by seldo 17y ago

See, the problem here is that she hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. 1. Used a device to measure the tire pressure and materials to build the booth and signs. Did they cost less than $5? Maybe. Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. 2. Well done on finding something you can acquire for free and then sell. However: did they make the reservations at 6pm and then sell them before 8pm? If not, the process of making the money took more than the 2 hours allotted. 3. You had two hours. Instead, you spent 2 hours talking to an advertising company and then a week later you sold 3 minutes of your time. Total time used to make $650: a week. In the real world you can't just discount lead time and idle time; that's a mistake made by a lot of starving contractors. The point of the puzzle is to work inside the constraints. "Thinking outside the box" is a great skill and all, but basically all these teams are doing is finding creative ways of breaking the rules. It means the puzzle isn't "make the most money in 2 hours with $5", it means the puzzle is "find out how far you can stretch these rules without being disqualified". Points for creativity, sure, but that wasn't the problem.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
proee 17y ago
Well I understand what you're saying here, but you're over-thinking the problem (like an engineer). The point of the exercise was to get the students excited about entrepreneurialism. The real world (read Wall Street) has plenty of constraints and people are always gaming the system to make a buck. So in this sense, it's a valid exercise. Edit: In terms of "gaming the system" I'd like to think of this as leveraging opportunities in the system for a particular gain, not "cheating" the system.
- seldo 17y ago
  Yes, because the lesson I really want people who are thinking of working on Wall Street to learn is that they should be trying to cheat the system.
  - wizard_2 17y ago
    With wall street as with most things, there is no "outside the system" everything is the system even if other people don't recognize it. I'll argue outside the rules is still inside the system, and that not all rules are created equal. On another note, Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions.
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      Sure, and it's why we need to have both regulation on the front-end, and courts on the back end, to discourage attempts to "game" the "system", so that people's actions which benefit themselves are also beneficial to the society at large.
    - forensic 17y ago
      "Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions." Not really. All the people who caused the problem are still employed and still rich. So for those entrepreneurs, they are still succeeding. It is the USA public who are failing at being entrepreneurs, not Wall Street.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Pretty much everyone that cheated the system was rewarded by the keeper of the system. So this sounds like a good lesson to learn. "You don't get ultra-rich by being ethical and honest."
  - bhousel 17y ago
    Do you really think it's reasonable to compare Wall Street to these lemonade-stand kinds of business school assignments? I'm starting to think there should be a "Godwin's Law" corollary -- as any discussion thread grows, the probability of comparisons to Wall Street approaches 1.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus, which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under five bucks? Yeah, they probably had to already have the tire pump and gauge. I presume that "what do we have in our closets" was an important part of the process of choosing this business plan. ;) And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own. This isn't accounting class. did they make the reservations at 6pm and then sell them before 8pm? Why not? Remember: They're doing this in parallel, using multiple team members and multiple restaurants. And, given the anecdote ("this works better for restaurants that hand out little buzzers") we're not talking about the sort of reservation that needs to be obtained hours in advance. We're talking about people paying for the privilege of jumping the line and turning a 40-minute wait into a 4-minute wait. You can get through quite a few cycles of that in two hours.
- seldo 17y ago
  You make valid points. My problem is less the specifics of the individual teams' solutions -- I don't dispute they were very clever and creative solutions -- but rather the impression that the greatest reward went to those who went furthest outside of the rules. Team 1 were arguably entirely within the rules and made $200, Team 2 went a little outside (unless they were handed the envelope at 6pm) and made a little more, Team 3 ignored the 2-hour stipulation entirely and made $650. Fundamentally, you're not rewarding creativity at money-making, you're rewarding creativity at rule-breaking.
  - varikin 17y ago
    If you watch the video, all teams were handed the envelop at the start of the week in class. They were allowed to think an form a business plan as long as they liked. They didn't know how much was in the envelop. Once they opened the envelop, they had 2 hours to make money.
j_b_f 17y ago
In the real world there aren't any constraints, but there are plenty of artificial limiters like the $5.
Tichy 17y ago
"Total time used to make $650: a week" You could use the "idle time" for other stuff.
- dotBen 17y ago
  The biggest issue with this one is its unrepeatable... it's a one time deal. They executed the advertising opportunity, now they have nothing. The other two, issues with their business practices aside, have set up businesses that could continue to operate, grow and scale. To me that deserves more recognition than a flash-in-the-pan idea.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    But that wasn't what they were asked to do. They weren't asked to develop the best sustainable business model with 2 hours and $5, they were asked to come back with the most money.
    - Devilboy 17y ago
      Team 4 phoned a rich family member and got him to donate $1000 to their effort.
      - koolkelso 17y ago
        That's one of the main things executives bring to the table in a business: connections.
raquo 17y ago
> The point of the puzzle is to work inside the constraints The constraint here is (your current resources + $5 + 2 hours), not just the $5 and 2 hours. And the point is to get profitable. It's an entrepreneurship puzzle, not programming puzzle.
teeja 17y ago
"she hands out two artificial constraints" But that's very important. People are constantly working under ... and handing out ... artificial constraints. Getting outside the box is one of the most important lessons. Who could possibly want to communicate but be limited to only 140 characters? The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil. "In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally."
- netcan 17y ago
  Not using the $5 at all thinking outside the box is. You break a rule that thought existed before you thought about it. It is a constraint on your mind, not your world. This is a space pencil. Using $10 instead of $5 is not thinking outside the box.
  - teeja 17y ago
    For some people finding fault is easier than seeing the point.
- daeken 17y ago
  "The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil." False: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
- jauco 17y ago
  The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil. they didn't, and pencils are useless in space 'cause of the filings floating around and jamming equipment
dbz 17y ago
The problem was 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible.' The problem was not 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible; however, you must use, and only use, that money while buying the materials you are going to require.' The problem was not designed to make students money but to show them that there are lots of possibilities in the world for success with hard entrepreneurial thought (they were given four days to think of a plan). I can be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the rules did not even matter (in the strictest sense). They could spend six dollars on buying signs and a bike pump to make their project a success because the goal of the "problem" was to open the minds of the young entrepreneurs. If each person did not come up with a brilliant idea, then there would be no harm. However, in mind of the problem, the students were supposed to hear what the other students did to achieve success because the path to achievement is the path to success. -> And that is why people take the class. They want to discover the path to success.
jdbrew222 17y ago
Arguing that the winning students have "broken the rules" assumes the rules dictated they had to spend all of the money; I didn't see or hear mention a requirement that they spend any or all of it anywhere. It seems to me a set of rules along one dimension of a subject in no way implies corollary sets of rules along any others. For example, if someone told you that you could create any password, but that you could only use three letters of the alphabet (e.g. A, B, and/or C), they haven't said you could not use each one once or more, or not use numbers, or characters, symbols, etc., and they certainly haven't said how long or short the password needs to be, or if you even need to use letters at all, or for that matter that you even needed to create a password; maybe you'd rather spend your time gardening! To me the three examples (even though they were kind of hokey) didn't so much turn the constraints on their heads as they did make them totally irrelevant... They made it less an issue of the constraints of certain explicit rules, and more about the implicit absence of others.

by seldo 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

proee 17y ago

Well I understand what you're saying here, but you're over-thinking the problem (like an engineer). The point of the exercise was to get the students excited about entrepreneurialism. The real world (read Wall Street) has plenty of constraints and people are always gaming the system to make a buck. So in this sense, it's a valid exercise. Edit: In terms of "gaming the system" I'd like to think of this as leveraging opportunities in the system for a particular gain, not "cheating" the system.

seldo 17y ago
Yes, because the lesson I really want people who are thinking of working on Wall Street to learn is that they should be trying to cheat the system.
- wizard_2 17y ago
  With wall street as with most things, there is no "outside the system" everything is the system even if other people don't recognize it. I'll argue outside the rules is still inside the system, and that not all rules are created equal. On another note, Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Sure, and it's why we need to have both regulation on the front-end, and courts on the back end, to discourage attempts to "game" the "system", so that people's actions which benefit themselves are also beneficial to the society at large.
  - forensic 17y ago
    "Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions." Not really. All the people who caused the problem are still employed and still rich. So for those entrepreneurs, they are still succeeding. It is the USA public who are failing at being entrepreneurs, not Wall Street.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Pretty much everyone that cheated the system was rewarded by the keeper of the system. So this sounds like a good lesson to learn. "You don't get ultra-rich by being ethical and honest."
- bhousel 17y ago
  Do you really think it's reasonable to compare Wall Street to these lemonade-stand kinds of business school assignments? I'm starting to think there should be a "Godwin's Law" corollary -- as any discussion thread grows, the probability of comparisons to Wall Street approaches 1.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus, which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under five bucks? Yeah, they probably had to already have the tire pump and gauge. I presume that "what do we have in our closets" was an important part of the process of choosing this business plan. ;) And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own. This isn't accounting class. did they make the reservations at 6pm and then sell them before 8pm? Why not? Remember: They're doing this in parallel, using multiple team members and multiple restaurants. And, given the anecdote ("this works better for restaurants that hand out little buzzers") we're not talking about the sort of reservation that needs to be obtained hours in advance. We're talking about people paying for the privilege of jumping the line and turning a 40-minute wait into a 4-minute wait. You can get through quite a few cycles of that in two hours.

seldo 17y ago
You make valid points. My problem is less the specifics of the individual teams' solutions -- I don't dispute they were very clever and creative solutions -- but rather the impression that the greatest reward went to those who went furthest outside of the rules. Team 1 were arguably entirely within the rules and made $200, Team 2 went a little outside (unless they were handed the envelope at 6pm) and made a little more, Team 3 ignored the 2-hour stipulation entirely and made $650. Fundamentally, you're not rewarding creativity at money-making, you're rewarding creativity at rule-breaking.
- varikin 17y ago
  If you watch the video, all teams were handed the envelop at the start of the week in class. They were allowed to think an form a business plan as long as they liked. They didn't know how much was in the envelop. Once they opened the envelop, they had 2 hours to make money.

j_b_f 17y ago

In the real world there aren't any constraints, but there are plenty of artificial limiters like the $5.

Tichy 17y ago

"Total time used to make $650: a week" You could use the "idle time" for other stuff.

dotBen 17y ago
The biggest issue with this one is its unrepeatable... it's a one time deal. They executed the advertising opportunity, now they have nothing. The other two, issues with their business practices aside, have set up businesses that could continue to operate, grow and scale. To me that deserves more recognition than a flash-in-the-pan idea.
- chrischen 17y ago
  But that wasn't what they were asked to do. They weren't asked to develop the best sustainable business model with 2 hours and $5, they were asked to come back with the most money.
  - Devilboy 17y ago
    Team 4 phoned a rich family member and got him to donate $1000 to their effort.
    - koolkelso 17y ago
      That's one of the main things executives bring to the table in a business: connections.

raquo 17y ago

> The point of the puzzle is to work inside the constraints The constraint here is (your current resources + $5 + 2 hours), not just the $5 and 2 hours. And the point is to get profitable. It's an entrepreneurship puzzle, not programming puzzle.

teeja 17y ago

"she hands out two artificial constraints" But that's very important. People are constantly working under ... and handing out ... artificial constraints. Getting outside the box is one of the most important lessons. Who could possibly want to communicate but be limited to only 140 characters? The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil. "In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally."

netcan 17y ago
Not using the $5 at all thinking outside the box is. You break a rule that thought existed before you thought about it. It is a constraint on your mind, not your world. This is a space pencil. Using $10 instead of $5 is not thinking outside the box.
- teeja 17y ago
  For some people finding fault is easier than seeing the point.
daeken 17y ago
"The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil." False: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
jauco 17y ago
The US spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in no-gravity. The Russians used a pencil. they didn't, and pencils are useless in space 'cause of the filings floating around and jamming equipment

dbz 17y ago

The problem was 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible.' The problem was not 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible; however, you must use, and only use, that money while buying the materials you are going to require.' The problem was not designed to make students money but to show them that there are lots of possibilities in the world for success with hard entrepreneurial thought (they were given four days to think of a plan). I can be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the rules did not even matter (in the strictest sense). They could spend six dollars on buying signs and a bike pump to make their project a success because the goal of the "problem" was to open the minds of the young entrepreneurs. If each person did not come up with a brilliant idea, then there would be no harm. However, in mind of the problem, the students were supposed to hear what the other students did to achieve success because the path to achievement is the path to success. -> And that is why people take the class. They want to discover the path to success.

jdbrew222 17y ago

Arguing that the winning students have "broken the rules" assumes the rules dictated they had to spend all of the money; I didn't see or hear mention a requirement that they spend any or all of it anywhere. It seems to me a set of rules along one dimension of a subject in no way implies corollary sets of rules along any others. For example, if someone told you that you could create any password, but that you could only use three letters of the alphabet (e.g. A, B, and/or C), they haven't said you could not use each one once or more, or not use numbers, or characters, symbols, etc., and they certainly haven't said how long or short the password needs to be, or if you even need to use letters at all, or for that matter that you even needed to create a password; maybe you'd rather spend your time gardening! To me the three examples (even though they were kind of hokey) didn't so much turn the constraints on their heads as they did make them totally irrelevant... They made it less an issue of the constraints of certain explicit rules, and more about the implicit absence of others.