I’ve been fascinated by this topic my entire career. I spent time working in Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom around the turn of the century. There were so many smart people and innovative companies floundering because they measured success in terms of the amount of venture capital raised or number of employees hired. When resources stopped flowing, they couldn’t adapt.
I returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD at the University of Michigan to examine why some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others flounder with so much. After over a decade of research in my capacity as a professor at Rice University, I realized it was time to make these ideas more accessible to businesses and individuals so they too could benefit from stretching.