Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Only Story in Town, where you get one great business story every week.
This edition is slightly different in that I want to explore an idea rather than a story. This idea is that constraints make us better. It is that success does not come from boundless ambition or aiming for the stars, but from setting boundaries that can unlock our creativity.
This idea comes from a new book by David Epstein called Inside The Box, which has just been published. The idea is counterintuitive, so let me explain.
I have been looking forward to this book since the author’s last title Range. That book explored how generalists were better placed to succeed in the modern world than specialists.
Range gave examples such as Roger Federer, perhaps the greatest tennis player of all-time. Rather than spending his whole childhood playing tennis (and building up his 10,000-hours of practice, which Malcolm Gladwell said was the key to success in his book Outliers), Federer played lots of different sports when he was young, only committing to tennis when he was a teenager. According to Range, this helped to explain why Federer moved so gracefully across the court and played with a style that had never been seen in tennis before.
Inside The Box puts forward another idea - that setting boundaries makes us more creative. As Epstein writes, reducing our choices forces us to get more out of what remains, which encourages us to be innovative. In contrast, when we have total freedom people tend to follow the path of least resistance, or just get lost.
The examples he gives on this are fascinating. They include Dmitri Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table because he needed a way to fit an explanation about chemical elements into a book. Another is the failure of the tech company General Magic in the 1990s. It had access to seemingly unlimited funds and talent but was unable to come up with a product that people actually wanted. It just produced a collection of interesting but random innovations. No-one at General Magic ever wrote down a hypothesis or a plan, they just tried to invent stuff.
Another person that Epstein features in the book is Bent Flyvbjerg, who was professor of major programme management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. His research found that only 8.5 per cent of big projects - such as public infrastructure work - finished on-time and on-budget.
He concluded that the projects which succeeded took the approach of “think slow, act fast”. They took the time to set boundaries and look at potential problems so the project could not spiral out of control. Then they got on with building it. In contrast, those that went wrong did the opposite - “think fast, act slow”. They started quickly and by the time it was clear there were problems, the project had become too big, so it was slow and expensive to change it.
In the book Epstein also speaks to Ed Catmull, the co-founder and former boss of Pixar, the brilliant movie studio behind Toy Story, Coco, Inside Out and a string of other animated movies. “I found early on that an abundance of resources leads to sloppiness,” Catmull says.
As you can see, these examples and comments challenge a lot of assumptions that are dominant in business right now. We celebrate start-ups based on how much money they raise, we talk about the beauty of having a “blank canvas” to work with, leaders are encouraged to give their team as much freedom as possible to flourish and Mark Zuckerberg has championed “move fast and break things”.
But much of this is dubious. The amount of money a start-up has raised represents its potential - how much money people are willing to commit to an idea to make it a reality - not necessarily the quality of their product. As the General Magic story shows, that potential can end in nothing. This feels like a particularly apt example right now as AI businesses like OpenAI raise tens of billions of dollars without the revenue or profit to match it.
What is also striking about the ideas in Inside The Box is that they are not that new. It is an important and excellent book, but these ideas have been around for years - even centuries.
Epstein’s book is full of stories from history about successful people using constraints to make themselves better - Mendeleev with the periodic table in the 1860s, Johann Sebastian Bach with music in the 1700s and Virginia Woolf with writing in the early 20th century.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” is a proverb that stems from the Greek philosopher Plato. In the book, Epstein also references a mantra from the advertising industry about trying to come up with a great new marketing campaign: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.”
So why does this all need saying again in a new book? Why have we become fixated on valuations, freedom and blank canvases?
