[未归类] What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 [复制链接]

cant0577
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电梯直达

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发表于 2011-12-2 01:42:34 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

本帖最后由 cant0577 于 2011-12-5 23:25 编辑

最近在看《What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20》是由斯坦福老师写的，感触颇深。也许很多人看过，但是还是想与大家分享一下啊。O(∩_∩)O~
我会每天都打一点该书的内容，内容多少不定，感兴趣的人可以随意喵喵几眼。希望给备考GRE的童鞋们有所帮助。
唔，有点担心这种方式算不算盗版啊？
在此申明下，版权为原著所有，任何商业用途请于作者联系啊

2011年12月1日
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20
Chapter I BUY ONE, GET TWO FREE
What would you do to earn money if all you had was five dollars and two hours?  This is the assignment I gave students in one of my classes at Stanford University. Each of fourteen teams received an envelope with five dollars of "seed funding" and was told they could spent as much time as they wanted planning. However, once they cracked open the envelope, they had two hours to generate as much money as possible. I gave then from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday evening to complete the assignment. Then, on Sunday evening, each team had to send me one slide describing what they had done, and on Monday afternoon, each team had three minutes to present their project in the class. They were encouraged to be entrepreneurial by identifying opportunities,challenging assumptions, leveraging the limited resources they had, and by being creative.

2011-12-2
What would you do if you were given this challenge? When I ask this question to most groups, someone usually shouts out, "Go to Los Vegas", or "Buy a lottery ticket." This gets a big laugh. These folks would take a significant risk in return for a small chance at earning a big reward. The next most common suggestion is to set up a car wash or lemonade stand, using the five dollars to purchase the starting materials. This is a fine option for those interested in earning a few extra dollars of spending money in two hours. But most of my students eventually found a way to move far beyond the standard responses. They took seriously the challenge to question the traditional assumption--exposing a wealth of possibilities--in order to creat much value as possible.

How did they do this? Here's a clue: the teams that made the most money didn't use the five dollars at all. They realized that focusing on the money actually framed the problems too tightly.  They understood that five dollars is essentially nothing and decided to reinterpret the problem more broadly: What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?  They ramped up their observation skills, tapped into their talents, and unlocked their creativity to identify their problems in their midst--problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing--problems they might have seen before but had never thougt to solve. These problems were nagging but not necessarily at the forefront of anyone's mind. By unearthing these problems and then working to solve them, the winner team brought in over $600, and the average return on the five dollar investment was 4000 percent! If you take into account that many of the teams didn't use the fund at all, then their financial returns were infinite.

So what did they do? All of the teams were remarkably inventive. One group indentified a problem common in a lot of college towns--the frustrating long lines at popular restaurants on Saturday night. The team decided to help those people who didn't want to wait in line.  They paired off and booked reservations at several restaurants. As the times for their reservations approached, they sold each reservation for up to 20 dollars to customers who were happy to avoid a long wait.

2011-12-5
As the evening wore on, they made several interesting observations. First, they realized that the female students were better at selling the reservations than the male students, probably because customers were more comfortable being approached by the young women. They adjuested their plan so that the male students ran around town making reservations at different resetaurants while the female students sold those places in line. They also learned that the entire operation worked best at the restaurants that use vibrateing pagers to alert customers when their table is ready. Physically swapping pagers made customers feel as though they were receiving something tangible for their money. They were more comfortable handing over their money and pager in exchange for the new pagers. This had additional bonus-- teams could sell the newly acquired pagers as the later reservation times grew nearer.

Another team took an even simpler approach. They set up a stand in front of the student union where they offered to measure bicycle tire pressure for free. If the tire needed filling, they added air for one dollar. At first they thought they were taking advantage of their fellow students, who could easily go to a nearby gas station to have their tires filled. But after their first few customers, the students realized that the bicyclists were incredibly grateful. Even though the cyclists could get their tires filled for free nearby, and the task were easy for the students perform, they soon realized that they were providing convinient and valuable service. In fact, halfway through the two hour period, the team stopped asking for a specific payment and requested the donation instead. Their income soared. They made much more than when asked to pay a fixed price. For this team, as well as for the team making restaurant reservations, experiementing along the way paid off. The iterative process, where small changes are made in response to customer feedback, allowed them to optimize their stragety on the fly.

Each of these projects brought in a few hundred dollars, and their fellow classmates were duly impressed. However, the team that generated the great profit looked at the sources at their disposal through completely different lenses, and made $650. These students determined that the most valuable asset they had was neither the five dollars or the two hours. Instead, their insight was that their precious resource was their three-minute presentation time on Monday. They decided to sell it to a company that wanted to recruit the students in the class. The team created a three-minute "commercial" for that company and showed it to students during the time they would have presented what they had done the prior week. This is brilliant. They recognized that they had a fabulously valuable asset--that others didn't even notice-- just waiting to be mined.

Each of the other eleven teams found clever ways to earn money, including running a photo booth at the annual Viennese Ball, selling maps that highligted local restaurants during Parents' Weekend, and designing and selling a custom T-shirt to the students in the class. One team accutally lost money when students purchased umbrellas to sell in San Francisco on a rainy day, only to have the weather clear up shortly after they launched their effort.  And, yes, one team ran a car wash and another started a lemonade stand, but their returns were much lower than average.