Kindergarteners Beat CEOs at This Engineering Challenge. The Reason Why

INC Magazine, Luni Libes, Kindergartenders beat CEOs

Imagine I gave you pasta, marshmallows, tape, and some string, and told you to build the tallest tower possible in 45 minutes. As a business leader, how would you do? Certainly better than a 5-year-old, right?

But when researchers actually tried this experiment, pitting kindergartners against CEOs, lawyers, and MBA students, it was the kids that came out on top, building towers averaging 26 inches tall, compared to 22 inches for the bosses. Business school students fared worst, reaching only a puny 10 inches.

Action beats deliberation.

You could read this story as an adorable illustration of the scrappiness and creativity of kids. And indeed, children are legendarily fearless and imaginative. But according to entrepreneur and author Luni Libes, who wrote about the experiment on his blog recently, there’s a far more actionable lesson leaders can take from the tale of the pasta towers.

Read the rest at inc.com

I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...

There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

I’ve never been able to explain why I have so hard of a time believing consultants. What is it about their role that make their conclusions so often so wrong? None other than Steve Jobs explains… in less than two minutes. “I don’t think there is anything inherently evil in consulting” … but “You never really taste it.” – Steve Jobs Share...

Nine of every ten startups fail. For the the last decade I’ve been sharing my 30+ years of experience to help lower that horrible statistic. And it is working. Eight of our ten of the companies at Africa Eats are still running, the oldest now over 10 years old and many soon to reach that milestone? How? Business planning. By not stopping with a Plan A, as Plan A rarely succeeds. By not only...