A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan & Mark Barden

Author:Adam Morgan & Mark Barden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118899458
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Resourcefulness and the mutually beneficial hustle

If we are resource-constrained, we need to be much more inventive in how we think about accessing more resources, and we need to redefine how we think about being resourceful.

Whether we're schoolteachers struggling to find the funds to run that extra class experiment, or managers in large corporations with insufficient headcount to get our projects done, if we open up our sense of availability, there are more resources accessible to us than we think. Stopping to take a fresh look, considering all the sources beyond those we would normally approach, and thinking again about what we might be able to offer and what we might gain in return, might reveal surprisingly abundant resources within reach. The discipline and structure in the framework in this chapter will be useful in overcoming the kind of path-dependent behavior that may once have rendered us blind to where new opportunities lie.

Embracing this kind of inventiveness takes us beyond the “value in kind” relationships of the past, toward the more ambitious, impatient, and mutually beneficial hustle of the 21st century, with all kinds of new value to exchange (Rent The Runway's data) in all kinds of new ways (Nike's Making app). Enabled by professional and social networking tools, accessing abundance is easier than ever before. It's a capability no longer confined to a department, but part of the planning process for any team that needs to deliver results within the limits imposed by a hyper-competitive, resource-constrained environment. The sale of the virtual reality headset company Oculus Rift, funded via Kickstarter in 2012, to Facebook for $2 billion less than two years later, was a symbol of re-evaluation (for better or worse) for the potential of crowdfunding.

The success of organizations such as Proctor & Gamble, with open innovation, and Mozilla's Firefox, with open source, shows the value of being, well, open to the outside. But in our experience, companies and brands outside the NGO space tend to fall between two stools: they are either still locked in a system where they try to do it all themselves (except for a couple of high-level, long-term strategic partnerships managed by someone in a division called Strategic Partnerships) or they rely on the wisdom of the crowd for nearly everything. That may be one way to access abundance, but it isn't the only one.

We will all need to become a great deal more disciplined and inventive in how we see and access abundance, if we are going to be truly resourceful.

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