Spaghetti, Marshmallow, and Business Strategy

Some root causes of weak strategies

Strategy — map it out yourself

Some root causes of weak strategies

Victor, the CEO, was disappointed. At least he told me so at the dinner. We spent two intense days with him and his team in a distant hotel in a rural place where the Internet barely worked. Our goal was to find new disruptive ideas for the company’s strategy, but we had to admit we didn’t find many. I used many different techniques, and the team tried to answer dozens of questions. But Victor was not satisfied.

“It was too obvious… Everybody on the market knows or even does it. Not a single original idea,” he complained to me.

“What’s wrong with the team?” he asked me.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the team. Unfortunately, many teams fall into the same trap.

The marshmallow challenge

“A few years ago, the designer and engineer Peter Skillman held a competition to find out. Over several months, he assembled a series of four-person groups at Stanford, the University of California, the University of Tokyo, and a few…