My wife and I visited Singapore last week for the first time in a couple of years, and I was reminded how impressed I am with the country. It illustrates a great strategy point, the subject of this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece, which borrows from Billy Preston, whose Billboard No. 1 hit song in October 1974, Nothing From Nothing, contained the immortal line: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.” This piece is a play on the line entitled Something From Nothing Leaves Something: How Strategy Choice Can Make Something out of Very Little. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Impressive Singapore
The minute you land at Changi—one of the world’s truly great airports—everything about the country works. Singapore is efficient, clean, and safe. It is always ranked at or near the top of the ratings for low crime rate. It has truly awesome food and great architecture.
And it is incredibly prosperous. The International Monetary Fund ranks it as the country with the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. I rank it first because the only one ahead of it, Liechtenstein, is a medium-size town of 40,000, not a real country (similarly for sub-1-million population jurisdictions like Luxembourg, Macao, or Brunei). Singapore may be small (population 6.1 million), but it is bigger than Ireland or Norway, other famously high-GDP countries. Its 2025 GDP per capita is estimated at $157,000, which is 74% higher than the U.S.’s. (Though the U.S. shouldn’t feel too bad. It is clearly harder to have a very high GDP per capita if you are a large country with more than 25 million people. The U.S. GDP per capita is 22% higher than the next biggest consequential country, Germany.)
Some may argue that you shouldn’t compare a city-state like Singapore to entire countries because there are lots of very rich cities. But even by that standard, Singapore is impressive. The highest GDP per capita of any other large city is San Francisco, at $145,000—8% lower than Singapore—and after San Francisco, there is a steep drop-off. The only sizable place richer is Silicon Valley, with a GDP per capita of $210,000, which is super impressive but not entirely comparable. It is a region anchored by one small city, San Jose.
The truly impressive thing about Singapore is not its current prosperity, but where it came from. Singapore truly created something from nothing—or at least from precious little.
Singapore became an independent country in 1965 after a fractious two years as a state of the newly formed Malaysia. Its GDP per capita at the time was estimated to be US$516, or just under $4,000 in 2025 dollars, which is around the same as the current levels of Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Papua New Guinea. So, it was a very poor country.
It had close to nothing with which to start. Its population was mainly ethnic Chinese, and there was no love lost between the Malays who surrounded it and the Singaporean Chinese. Singapore had zero natural resources. And in the 1960s global economy, it was in the middle of nowhere geographically—not known for a single thing other than the Singapore Sling cocktail.
But it then proceeded to increase its GDP per capita at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3% for 60 years—unprecedented in the modern global economy. No jurisdiction has kept up that rate of growth for that long.
Something from Something Strategy
If you have a rich endowment of valuable resources—whether you are a country or a company—the strategy imperative is to exploit those resources to overwhelm any competitor (i.e., to play chicken).
For example, if you are the U.S., you start with the richest endowment of natural resources in the world, the largest endowment of arable land, a favorable geography (mainly protected by oceans), and a large flow of motivated immigrants, and you invest heavily to exploit the natural resources. Then you use the wealth generated to invest more than any other country in becoming the world’s manufacturing superpower, including building a vast and efficient rail system—and later an interstate highway system—to move goods. Then you use that wealth to invest more in education and scientific research than any other country to become the world’s technology superpower. During your ascendancy, you simply out-invest every other jurisdiction in extremely expensive sources of advantage—and there is nothing they can do to stop you.
The same dynamic applies to companies. If you are relatively better endowed, your imperative is to invest in expensive advantages that your competitors can’t match. For example, when upstart Reebok challenged Nike in athletic shoe sales, Nike invented a new scale-sensitive cost category—athlete endorsement (e.g., Air Jordan, Dream Team, etc.)—and cranked up the investments in this category to heights never even contemplated before until Reebok said “no mas.” The rest is history: Reebok flatlined and Nike solidified its dominance.
The general rule, then, is that when you have a resource advantage over competition, look to invest in the most expensive sources of competitive advantage.
Something from Nothing
But if you are at a major resource disadvantage, like Singapore was in 1965, the imperative is to seek sources of advantage that are cheap and doable for you, but tricky for the competition to follow—not an easy strategy choice task.
That was the brilliance of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s prime minister from before its independence through 1990. His fundamental strategy choice was to make Singapore the most efficient and secure place to do business in South Asia. He would ensure that it would be easy to do business in Singapore for foreign companies, and they could be confident that they could transact business without fear of the corruption endemic to that part of the world.
Strategically, I love this because it didn’t require a huge expenditure of capital (which they didn’t have). It required clever choices—for example, to have the best-paid bureaucrats in the world, so that they don’t feel compelled to make extra money on the side. Is that free? No, but the cost pales in comparison to, say, a single giant infrastructure project.
And it required building and nurturing a judicial system that was willing to fight corruption—and punish it severely. Again, this is not an expensive investment. Rather, it requires extreme commitment and careful ongoing attention.
The other strategy tool that Singapore deployed was flexibility. The island nation famously transitioned through multiple economic phases—from labor-intensive to skill-intensive to capital-intensive to tech-intensive to innovation-intensive—across its relatively short history, pivoting more quickly and proactively than competitive jurisdictions.
These are the kind of things that many well-endowed competitors are just not willing to do—i.e., they pass the “won’t” part of the “can’t/won’t test.” They would rather spend big on something easier for them to carry out. Prime Minister Lee was absolutely resolute in ensuring adherence to his key strategy choices for the many decades during which he was in charge.
Of course, as Singapore became rich, it was able to spend heavily on more expensive things like its massive investment in education and logistics infrastructures, like the aforementioned Changi airport in the late 1970s—and then the airport’s recent enhancement, the award-winning $1 billion Jewel shopping mall featuring the world’s tallest indoor waterfall.
Personal Cases of Something from Nothing
The something-from-nothing strategy approach is near and dear to my heart because I have needed to employ it in multiple personal leadership roles—for example, with the Rotman School at the University of Toronto and with Tennis Canada.
Rotman School
When I became dean of the Rotman School in 1998, we had very little going for us. We were poor, with a budget one-quarter the size of our leading competitor, and we were running a deficit on that tiny budget. The business school was hemorrhaging professors to U.S. universities because the Canadian dollar had plummeted from 87¢ to 67¢ over the previous several years, leaving Rotman salaries uncompetitive relative to U.S. professorial salaries. The school’s alumni were disengaged, and we weren’t connected at all to the Toronto business community. Overall momentum was significantly negative.
We had to figure out how to build advantages cheaply—and I mean really cheaply. One way was to take our very expensive academic research—that only other academics normally read—and make it readable and interesting for a broader business audience, which we did inexpensively through Rotman Magazine, transforming it from a mediocre alumni magazine to an internationally valued source of business thinking. It helped put the school on the map for its business ideas at a tiny cost. Other schools didn’t follow because they were run by academics who placed a low value on engaging businesspeople with their research findings.
We developed a narrative that Rotman stood for fundamentally transforming business education—A New Way to Think. Our boldness earned us a massive amount of earned media—more than all the other Canadian business schools combined—at a time when we had zero resources to invest in paid media.
I learned that I had a cheap but valuable currency when it came to motivating professors—my love and affection. The ones that taught well and contributed to translating research into actionable business ideas received disproportionate public accolades from me, and that moved the needle on their efforts more dramatically than I might have imagined. They would bring back stories from colleagues at other competing schools who wished their deans cared as much as I did for the work of my professors.
Those cheap but effective strategy choices enabled us to build resources to subsequently invest in expensive things—like professors, student services, and a new building.
Tennis Canada
When I joined the board of Tennis Canada in 2005, we were deeply in debt from having built a new tennis stadium in Toronto, we had little history of success internationally—and the modest successes were in the relatively distant past—and, as a cold country that had never prioritized tennis, we had very few year-round tennis courts. (They had to be indoor courts or outdoor courts that were bubbled during the winter months.)
We were an also-ran competing against established tennis nations that had historical advantages and orders of magnitude more resources. Nonetheless, we sought to become counted among the leading tennis nations—like the U.S., Spain, France, Germany, Australia, and Russia.
A key potential resource that wasn’t being exploited was Tennis Canada’s ownership of both a men’s (ATP) and women’s (WTA) top level (1000 series) tournament (of which there are only nine and 10, respectively), the biggest and most important annual tournaments after the four Grand Slams (U.S. Open, Australian Open, Wimbledon, and Roland Garros). We ran it as a competitive sports event, not a valuable economic property.
We hired an experienced sports entertainment executive, Michael Downey, as our new CEO, and he turned them into the second-highest revenue pair of 1000-series tournaments, trailing only Indian Wells, the plaything of Larry Ellison, the centibillionaire with unlimited investment resources.
We were able to invest the massively increased cash flow provided by the tournaments in an innovative approach to player development. The resulting success of our Canadian tennis stars generated plenty of earned media and sponsorship dollars. We leveraged Canada into a leading tennis nation by inexpensively transforming a wasted asset into a powerful strategic tool.
Practitioner Insights
If you lag your competitors dramatically in resources, don’t cry yourself to sleep at night and give up. You have a tough and tricky strategy task—but not an impossible one. Your central task is to think through how you can gain an advantage on the cheap.
Start by refusing to focus on and obsess about how and on what your competitors are spending their massive resources. Instead ask, despite all that spending, what are customers missing? By the way, that means customers of all sorts because many modern markets are two-sided (including Rotman’s and Tennis Canada’s).
Then spend all your strategic thinking energy on finding inexpensive ways to achieve uniqueness in meeting those unmet customer needs.
Search along two vectors. The first is to recognize the assets right under your nose that you aren’t utilizing for strategy purposes—like the two 1000-level tournaments, academic research that had zero impact on businesspeople, and the dean’s love and affection. The second is to identify cheap but valuable assets that you can create—like a low-corruption environment, or a more exciting and appealing approach to business education.
As Lee Kuan Yew amply demonstrated: Where there is a will, there is a way to create something from nothing.
The HBR Executive Playbook on turning C-suite meetings from a box-checking exercise to a catalyst for decisive action.
In 2011, Patagonia faced the same pressure every retailer faces on Black Friday: maximize sales on the year’s biggest shopping day. Instead, they ran a full-page ad in the New York Times with a stark message: “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The ad detailed the environmental cost of making their bestselling R2 fleece, such as 135 liters of water in the manufacturing process and 20 pounds of carbon dioxide for transporting it to the company’s warehouse.
This wasn’t a clever marketing ploy. The ad directly urged customers to think twice before purchasing, to fix existing gear before replacing it, and to buy and sell second-hand. This was a real commitment to the values that had driven Patagonia since Yvon Chouinard founded the company in 1973: putting environmental protection above profit maximization, even when market logic demanded otherwise. As a result of staying true to their deepest values, Patagonia today has a fiercely loyal customer base and enjoys more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Patagonia is a striking example of a business that has thrived not by giving in to pressure to change, but rather by doubling down on their core ideas. Another such example is fast-food favorite In-N-Out Burger, which has spent 75 years refusing to franchise, expand quickly, or add more items to its menu. Unlike McDonald’s, which tried to reinvent itself as a purveyor of healthy foods a decade ago, In-N-Out has stuck to making burgers, fries, and milkshakes. The result? Cult-level customer devotion and some of the highest per-store revenues in the fast-food industry.
Patagonia and In-N-Out Burger are not dinosaurs that have failed to adapt. They are billion-dollar businesses with the kind of customer devotion and employee loyalty that money can’t buy. And a large part of the reason for this success is that they have mastered a counterintuitive truth: the more things change, the more you need to stay the same.
The virtue of staying steadfast
In order to thrive in change, we need the ability to resist change. This ability, which I call steadfastness, is essential for two reasons.
First, organizations liberate enormous energy by committing to their identity and purpose in times of change. This commitment gives people a reason to endure change and turmoil. As the German philosopher Nietzsche famously said, those who have a why can bear almost any how. This reason, and the energy and strength it liberates, becomes a crucial resource for organizations that are confronted with change—and in our current era, that is all organizations, all the time.
Second, it gives you a fixed point by which to navigate, which is especially important in times of change. When an organization sticks to its core identity and purpose, it is better placed to understand how to respond to the changes it faces. In-N-Out’s core mission is to make great burgers, and by sticking to it, the company can navigate major changes in the business landscape by asking a simple question: how can this change help us make great burgers?
Steadfastness should not be mistaken for the kind of dangerous rigidity that can run a company into the ground. Kodak didn’t fail because it stayed true to its purpose of helping people capture and share memories—it failed because its leaders became overcommitted to the business model of maximizing profits by selling film. The critical distinction is this: be steadfast about your why (your purpose), but be flexible about your how (your methods). Patagonia’s purpose is protecting nature, not selling as many fleece jackets as possible. In-N-Out’s purpose is making great burgers, not resisting technology. When you are clear about this distinction, steadfastness becomes a source of strength rather than a path to obsolescence.
The dual demand of organizational resilience
Understanding the difference between purpose and methods points to a deeper challenge: organizations must somehow find a way to be both immovable and infinitely adaptable at the same time. They need to be unshakeable about their why while being completely willing to reinvent their how.
This is what makes building resilience so difficult. It requires holding two contrasting capabilities in perfect tension. Most organizations fail at one extreme or the other. Some chase every trend and lose their identity in the process while others cling to outdated methods and mistake their current business model for their reason for being.
But there is a group of people who have mastered implementing both sets of capabilities simultaneously: entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial journey demands both unwavering commitment to a vision and constant willingness to change tactics. This entrepreneurial mindset—this ability to be both stubborn and adaptable—is not just for startups. It is the key to building resilience in any organization. And it rests on four specific traits that enable leaders to navigate the tension between steadfastness and flexibility.
Four entrepreneurial traits that build resilience
1. Love. Entrepreneurs don’t fall in love with their products—they fall in love with the problem they’re solving and the people they’re serving. This distinction is critical. When you love your product, you resist necessary changes. When you love your purpose, you’ll do whatever it takes to fulfill it. Love for purpose creates both the commitment to persist and the freedom to change. It’s what allows organizations to ask: “Does this method still serve what we love?” rather than protecting methods that have become comfortable but ineffective.
2. Embracing Suffering as Growth. Every entrepreneur knows the particular pain of watching a cherished strategy fail. But they learn to reframe suffering as a source of learning, a font of hard-won data about what doesn’t work. This reframing serves a dual purpose: it makes you quick to abandon failing tactics while simultaneously strengthening your commitment to the purpose that makes the suffering worthwhile.
3. Building Partnerships. Entrepreneurs know that the right partners don’t just share your current strategy—they share your purpose. This distinction is crucial for resilience. Partners who are only aligned on methods will abandon you when those methods fail. Partners who are aligned on purpose will help you find new methods when the old ones stop working. True partners act as both innovation catalysts (pushing you to try new approaches) and guardians of purpose (keeping you honest about your why). They give you permission to change everything except what matters most.
4. The Power of Saying No. The hardest entrepreneurial skill is saying no—both to opportunities that don’t serve your purpose and to methods that no longer work. This dual discipline is what creates resilience. Every time you say no to a profitable distraction, you strengthen your commitment to purpose. Every time you say no to a failing approach, you free resources for innovation. This discipline is what allows organizations to be both focused and agile. It’s the skill that prevents both mission drift and tactical stubbornness.
Building the resilient organization
At the company level, the challenge is to master the tension of being steadfast about purpose while flexible about methods. Here are three ways to build this capability:
1. Define your non-negotiables. Write down your organization’s core purpose—the why that will never change regardless of market pressure—and separate it explicitly from your current methods, products, and business models. Make this distinction visible throughout the organization so everyone understands what must be protected and what can be reimagined.
2. Distinguish purpose from method in every decision. When facing changes or challenges, explicitly ask: “Is this about our why (which we won’t compromise) or our how (which we can reimagine)?” Make this question a standard part of strategic discussions, and promote leaders who consistently make this distinction well.
3. Practice strategic steadfastness. The next time you face pressure to chase a trend or copy a competitor, pause and ask whether it serves your core purpose. If not, say no publicly and explain why. Each time you hold firm on purpose while adapting methods, you build organizational muscle memory for true resilience.
Change is inevitable. The organizations that will thrive aren’t those that resist all change or embrace every trend, but those that know exactly what to preserve and what to transform.
Acknowledging even your smallest achievements can help you stay anchored and motivated.
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