INTRODUCTION
The beauty in constraint, and why it matters

A few years ago, the Internet meme "Do Your Best Jagger" sprung from the game of the same name. The rules were not complicated: players could challenge each other, at any time, in any place, in any medium they liked, to do an impression of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones performing on stage.

As soon as you received the challenge, you were obliged to do your impression. There was no waiting until you were somewhere a bit more private, or until you had taken your coat off, or finished your falafel. You had to channel your inner Mick there and then, in front of whatever audience you found yourself-and in the consequent video lay the success of the meme.

The interesting question is not so much why one would ever start on this kind of madness, but why the game worked so well. How was it that, even when imitated poorly by a reluctant amateur at the counter in Subway, the audience understood that Sir Michael Philip Jagger was briefly in their midst? How did the veteran rocker come to create an onstage routine recognizable to anyone with even the briefest acquaintance with a Rolling Stones concert?

The answer lies in the beneficial effect of a constraint.

In Keith Richards' autobiography, Life, Jagger's fellow Stone explains how this distinctively flamboyant style came about. When the Stones started, he says, they played very, very small venues, and by the time the equipment was set up and the audience in place the singer often had a space no bigger than the size of a table to perform in. But as the front man of a band ambitious to break through, Jagger learned to work it, even in such a confined area, and it was from this combination of desire and restriction that his unique moves evolved.

At some point, consciously or unconsciously, the young singer made a decision about how to respond to the space constraint. It could have led him to be static, restricted, somehow less; instead he used it as stimulus to be more dramatic, engaging, distinctive, compelling. He used it to make him more.1

Beauty or the beast?

Constraints have a bad rap. Constraint is, by definition, a negative thing. Its imposition prevents us from acting as we would like to, because it restricts us in some important way. Constraints hold us down, knock us back, make us fail. "Don't fence me in," the old song says: if you want me to show what I can do, then leave me unconstrained.

This book's aim is to show how and why the opposite is true. How constraints can be fertile, enabling, desirable. Why they are catalytic forces that stimulate exciting new approaches and possibilities. How they can, in fact, make us more than we were, rather than less than we could be. Why we should see in them beauty, rather than the beast, and why that is more important now than ever.

The invisible gift

The beneficial power of constraint is all around us, whether we recognize it or not. In lifelong relationships, we commit to one partner to the exclusion of others; the constraint we put on ourselves allows us to focus our emotional energy on building a life with that person, and gives us a deeper level of intimacy and security in return. In play, we understand that the limitations our favorite game's rules impose also give that game its unique character, energy, and pleasure; to relax those parameters means less of each. And a critical part of good parenting lies in understanding what limits are beneficial both to our children and to our family life-and then staying true to them, whether they are welcomed by our adorable little digital natives or not.

In business, the forced but delicious fruits of constraint are all around us, their starting impetus now all but forgotten. Google's home page is as simple as it is because that was the limit of Larry Page's coding ability at the time. He couldn't afford external resources, and all he knew how to do was create a search box and a logo-so while the rest of the search brands visually cluttered their home pages, Google's simplicity stood out for its understated respect for the user. Mario, the most famous character in the world's largest entertainment business, is as colorful as he is because of the challenges of eight-bit technology: to compensate for poor pixilation definition, designer Shigeru Miyamoto gave the character a large nose to emphasize his humanity, a mustache to obviate the need for a mouth and facial expressions, overalls to make it easier to see his arms in relation to his body, and a cap to free him from the problems of animating hair; the most recognizable character in video game history was born of technical constraints. Basketball owes much of its relentless energy to the introduction of the 24-second shot clock in 1954. And Twitter-well, we all know about Twitter. Which of us would be using Twitter at all today, if it had a limit of 14,000 characters rather than 140?

While the benefits differ, each of these constraints prompted a kind of enhancement. The people working with them made their constraints beautiful.

New realities that call for a renewed inventiveness

Any good business has always worked within clear parameters. The whole concept of a brand, for instance, is in effect a beautiful constraint. It is the clarity on what that brand is not, as much as what it is, that allows a team to focus on finding fresh, relevant, and inventive ways to be true to what it stands for. When a brand stops respecting those limits and tries to become something it is not, it becomes weaker.

As authors and practitioners, we have spent most of our professional lives thinking about strategy and constraint. Our company specializes in challenger brands and businesses, for whom an ability to turn constraints to their advantage is particularly important. Challengers always have ambitions larger than their resources, and often lack what conventional wisdom would consider to be critical: a marketing budget, an R&D department, or a certain kind of functionality, for instance. They have to work with their constraints, reframing the conversation, creating a different marketing or business model. Indeed, how a challenger can make constraints beautiful often lies, for them, at the heart of a successful strategy.

In the sixteen years since we started eatbigfish, there has been a broader shift toward thinking like a challenger. It has become common to hear established market leaders talking about the need to maintain a challenger mindset as they seek to keep pace with a changing world, alert to insurgents keen to eat their lunch. Forced to compete for growth with ever-leaner headcount, resources and time, the injunction to "do more with less" has entered the mainstream-albeit without any real definition of what that means or how to do it. Regardless of the nature or size of the business, constraints of time, resources, and people are here to stay. One of the leadership challenges of today, like it or not, is the requirement to grow within constraints.

There is no shortage of stimuli here. All around us we see a new generation of inventiveness with constraint at its heart. Cars that go faster while using less fuel, fast food that's healthier, farming methods that create greater yields while using less water.

Sometimes these businesses are responding to constraints imposed on them. A new beer company, launched in the recession, lacked a marketing budget and was denied a bank loan. So instead they shared equity for cash, multiplying customer loyalty and advocacy, and became the fastest growing food-and-drink brand in the UK. Four California schools found a way to catch students up three grade levels in a year while biting down on a reduced budget. An unloved, long-struggling detergent brand, denied access to superior cleaning ingredients, found a different way to create value, and became Unilever's fastest-growing global brand.

Often, though, they are businesses that look to create breakthroughs and competitive advantages by imposing challenging constraints upon themselves. A new boutique hotel chain created a high-end yet affordable experience by denying itself many of the givens of a great hotel, such as the reception desk and restaurant. A seventy-year-old furniture company set itself the target of producing a coffee table for just twice the price of a latte to put on it, and found an entirely new way to make a table. The ruling body of a motor sport precipitated a clutch of new innovations by requiring every competing team to produce engines that were 30 percent more fuel efficient, while maintaining the speeds that keep audiences excited.

We are living in an era of extraordinary people rewriting our sense of what is possible. They make an unarguable case that a constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change-we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough. Not in spite of the constraint, but because of it.

The Age of Scarcity, The Age of Abundance

We sit at a nexus between an abundance of possibilities on one hand, and the reality of scarcities on the other. As business people, there is so much insight and opportunity available to us today. If we care to, we can learn how dynamic companies are breaking through, anywhere on earth. We have unprecedented opportunities to connect with our customers. Scores of potential partners could help us rethink, retool, manufacture, source,...