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[Music] thank you again to Adam and for putting on this event I'm really honored to be
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able to speak to you today about stretch my name is Scott Simon chine and I'm not
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just the author of stretch but I'm also a professor of organizational behavior
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at Rice now before I got into academia when I was around the age of many of you in
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this room I was working my first job in Washington DC and I got a phone call out
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of the blue from a recruiter and the recruiter said come to Silicon Valley there's lots of excitement here we'll
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pay you a lot more money we'll give you a lot of stock options well feed your
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breakfast lunch and dinner every day this is a job you should be taking so three weeks later I left family and
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friends and I took the job I never really reflected on why I was taking the job and of course when I got there
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there's also some rather bizarre behavior too because the way that organizations were judging their success
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was very much about what type of resources they were getting how much venture capital Oh could they raise how
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many new employees would come in each week how many customers could they get notwithstanding if even these customers
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are actually profitable if any of you remember pets.com of course that was the poster child of the dot-com era so I got
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me starting to think about some of these behaviors where we're so focused on our
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lives around chasing resources because we developed this dependence that we think in norther to find success and
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satisfaction we need more resources and we orient all of our energy in all of our efforts to trying to get more
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resources as opposed to doing more and oftentimes that's because we think that
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is the only pathway to success and satisfaction so that started getting me thinking and I've been doing research
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ever since about well what might be an alternative way of doing this and that led me to the idea of stretching which
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is a simple but powerful shift and how we think about resources everything from time money relationship connections
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knowledge it's not so much what we have it's how do we use those resources how
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can we be more creative in using what we have so there's some important differences in
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how our mindset approaches resources when we are stretching we believe that any resource is changeable so we're
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trying to get a picture hung on the wall and we don't have a hammer we don't give second thought we just
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take the shoe off of our foot and we we get the job done when we're chasing we
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got to find that hammer we got this search and search for it if we don't have it we're gonna go out and get it
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when we're stretching our whole focus is on how do we expand what we have to do
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more with it how might we take what we know in one context and put it in another context as opposed to when we're
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chasing it's all about what we're going to do to acquire the next thing because
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unless we require that next thing we can't actually do more we can't take
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ourselves to the next level we can't become happier if we don't have it and
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often what's driving this chasing behaviors what psychologists call social comparisons we look around other friends
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or colleagues or neighbors and we see what they have and we think we need the same in order to find that success in
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satisfaction but what's lost in this whole process are the goals that we have
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whether the inward goals that we're actually trying to accomplish for most people it really isn't just about giving
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more resources those are usually and those are usually means to a certain ends but we lose sight of whether actual
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goals are when we're chasing so stretching is the psychology of resourcefulness and helping teach us
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what we can do better with what we have but when we think of resourcefulness we usually think of something that's used
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for those in less fortunate circumstances so it could be for the poor or maybe someone who had just come
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to this country and doesn't know a lot of people or have a lot of money well my challenge in the book is really
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about how do we embrace the same psychology of resourcefulness because if you look at the history of many
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successful people who have also found satisfaction in their lives they started off resourceful they started off with
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not a lot and then the challenge is how do we maintain this type of mindset as we find ourselves with access to more
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and more resources can we maintain that scrappiness the same thing with organizations we have the classic garage
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startup but those organizations grow they want to show their success so they tend to change the way that they they do
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business so what I'd like to convince you of is there are there are times where if we
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embrace less we can actually end up doing more in the same notion of resourcefulness that fuels a lot of
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success in satisfaction really in our careers when their backs are against the wall can help bring us success as we
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move forward so the first thing is to own it now ownership is not a word that you think would describe a retail
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employee who barely makes above minimum wage but what I learned in my research is that it has a profound impact on the
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way that people approach their resources and I'll tell you an example I was doing
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a study of a chain of women's fashion boutiques and I went to the most successful store in this chain and to
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the most successful employee in this company and I said tell me how you do it or would he do this he gave me an
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example he told me about this time where he had a whole host of dresses that weren't selling he quite frankly
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described them as a piece of crap I mean they were falling off the hanger no one
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wanted to buy them so what he did is rather remarkable he took a pair of scissors and he cut the straps off and
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he rolled up the dress he put a tie around it and created a sign and said beach cover-up
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it went from a worst seller to a best seller now in many organizations of course this would get you fired right
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it's called damaging the goods in this organization he was celebrated I spent
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the next two years traveling around the country talking to his colleagues and hearing about their own cut off the
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straps moments and there wasn't just about physical products it was how they
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thought about training how they thought about customer service how they thought about operations in the overarching
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pattern in the day there was this when we believed that we owned not literally owned but psychologically owned our
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resources we give ourselves the license that creative freedom to solve problems in ways that are not anticipate a bull
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to constraints unleash creativity and the land of chase and constraints are absolutely terrible because we judge the
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worth of projects and we even judge the worth of ourselves by how many resources
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who's got the bigger office who's got more people on their team who's got the
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largest budget but it actually turns out that there are times we're having less
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unlocks that creativity to allow you to sell problems so in one study what researchers did is they
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brought in groups of students and they randomly divided them into two groups group a was told think of how the time
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as a child when you grew up not having a lot that was the scarcity group the second group were told think about the
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time growing up when you did have a lot that was the abundance group both groups
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were then told to solve a practical problem the universities computer lab had some extra bubble wrap what should
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we do with this well it turns out that simply thinking about scarcity led to more creative and innovative ideas and
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the reason is rather simple when we surround ourselves with abundance the way that the mind works is it focuses on
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the most conventional way of using a resource but we embrace scarcity and me think about scarcity we give ourselves
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that licence to use objects and think about objects in very different ways so in this case having less gave us the
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freedom to actually do more right three Outsiders solve problems and I should probably start with a caveat that I
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don't mean to diminish expertise you know if someone were the COO one of you
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were to come into my office for office hours and say you know dr. something trying they need a tooth pulled I would
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send you to the dentist and tell you I'm not that type of doctor so there's a
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there's a reason why we have experts but there's also something to be said about
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the role of outside there is those who actually know less about a specific topic so in one study what researchers
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did is they looked at all of the studies that examine the relationship between expertise measured by the amount of
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practice someone has and how it relates to performance and it turns out that for
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games like chess the relationship between performance and expertise is 26% now that's not bad although my guess is
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it's probably lower than you were the guest when it comes time to music it's
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21% sports 18% this next one gives me a lot of pause because it's education and
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it's largely college students it's 4% and professional work it's less than 1%
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now there's also a clear pattern in the way that the data are trending which is
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essentially as you move from structured activities like games where the rules are knowing
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in advance and they never change to less structured activities where the rules are often changing or unknowable and
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these are the things where we spend most of our waking lives doing the role of expertise dramatically diminishes and
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the reason for this is quite simple experts are very good at what they're doing but they use tools in very
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specific ways because that's that's how they've been trained so they have a hard
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time applying their tools to different types of problems when the environment changes around them this was backed up
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by some other research that looked at 10 10 different countries 166 scientific labs researchers wanted to ask a very
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simple but important question what is the relationship between what you know about a specific scientific domain and
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your likelihood to actually solve a problem in that domain seems like a straightforward question and in fact
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they found a positive relationship the more that someone knew about a specific scientific domain the less likely they
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were to solve the problem in other words biologists were better at solving the chemistry problems and the chemists and
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vice-versa for success comes from doing not planning now again there is important
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times in our lives where we want the plan but we often over plan and we over plan and we trick ourselves into
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thinking that the reality that's captured in our plans all of that information all of that data is actually
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true when the reality is is it's very hard to know what's gonna happen in five
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years in fact it's very hard to know what's gonna happen in the next day and
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the times that we find ourselves in right now and in fact if you look at the research there's very little correlation
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between strategic planning and organizational performance so I learned this firsthand the very first class I
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taught is at the University of Michigan I was still a PhD student is undergraduate introduction to management
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class and lo and behold this is probably no surprise to many of you in the room but when you put participation in the
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syllabus lots of people want to participate so I have a treasure trove of hands up in the air everyone was
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vying for airtime so I thought okay there's a really simple way of managing this what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna
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say okay you're going to talk knew they knew then you know I've literally go around the horn in the
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classroom and I designate eight or nine different people to speak but what would
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happen is I get to the fourth or fifth person and with the bravado that you might have in some of your classes and
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more than where someone is just so confident that what they're saying is the most remarkable thing they deliver
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yeah you guys are all laughing for a reason they deliver they deliver you know this this comment and they'd be so
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proud and it has that big smirk on their face and everyone else in the room had a
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look of horror and they couldn't figure out why why is everyone looking at me so
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funny well it turned out what they did is they had just repeated the exact comment of the person sitting right next
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to them who had just spoken so we have a name for this it's called the next-in-line effect and what happens is
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when we are so focused on preparation and we have a speaking order so like I had a speaking order the mind shuts out
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as much as nine seconds before it's our turn to speak and as much as nine seconds after it's our turn to speak and
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that makes sense because there's nine seconds before we're planning our performance we want that we want to get
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that plan we want that really clever comment that we actually miss what just unfolded in front of us in those nine
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seconds afterwards we're thinking how did I perform did I meet the plan was a
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well received and so we end up not listening so what I try and do is you know put some more improvisational
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activities into my classroom to get people to more spontaneously just start acting and gather this idea that when we
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plan everything we end up with better results and I think I want to kind of leave you with one story that really
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captures this I'm guessing no one in the room knows who this is anyone really
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surprised you might know his name his name is Dan Wyden he's an advertising executive and one day he had a problem
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on his hands he had a client who needed a slogan to kind of make all of the different media campaigns come together
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so dan why there's a resourceful person he was in the scrappy makeshift office
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it was in the basement of a building because he couldn't afford prime real estate he didn't even have a phone back
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then there were no cell phone so he had a payphone that was his office phone with his back up against the wall he had
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a deadline and he recalled a rather bizarre situation for what he was trying to accomplish about ten years
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before and they a man by the name of Gary Gilmore was not a very nice person was in the news because he had killed
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two people Gilmore was a lifelong criminal you know horrible person but unlike many people on death row Gary
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Gilmore did not wanted to die right away so his mother interjected and Gary Gilmore's go away I really want to just
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die mom and he kept saying this to all of these associations when it was finally his turn to die in the execution
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chamber his last words were let's do it so that gave Dan why then enough material to finish his job because his
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advertising slogan that they came up with is arguably the most successful one in business history and I think it's a
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great example for three reasons one that you think about the context in which Dan why then produced this back
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against the wall time constraints came up with this idea to you think about what he repurposed something that didn't
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seem valuable at all I mean first of all you won't find this on the Nike homepage
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I can tell you that for sure but he took the slogan of a lifelong criminal his last words and turned it into this
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cultural icon and has sold lots and lots of stuff and changed our society because
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it's a third part that I really want to emphasize here because the phrase itself
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really activates us to start doing things and not to wait for the plan or the ideal resources think about how many
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times you might hear from other people or you might even say to yourself if I only had more time or more money or more
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information or more connections this is what I could do when we're stretching
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the time to act is right now so what I'd like to leave you with is just to reflect on those times where you think
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that you don't have enough are there ways that you might be able to better use what you have to stretch those
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resources and find great success and satisfaction thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause]