A Beautiful Constraint

By: Isaac Camel

In Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s book A Beautiful Constraint they talk about how to transform your limitations into advantages. There were a lot of great key points to take away from this book, but I would like to talk about two that stood out to me.

The first is at the very beginning of the book when the authors talk about changing the definition of constraints themselves. In the traditional sense constraints are looked at as negative, something holding you back “It restricts us in some important way”. The book aims at trying to show is that actually the opposite is true. The constraints can be desirable, enabling, and can force us into new approaches and possibilities that are exciting. The thing about constraints is that they are all around us, and it is our responsibility whether we recognize them or not. This book is about changing they way we think. A great example that they use is lifelong relationships. We don’t look at the constraint when we commit to one partner as we exclude lifelong relationships with other people. We look at the constraint of allowing our self to focus all of our emotional energy into that one person and create a deeper level of intimacy. To become a more successful business we need to first acknowledge what are constraints are. Then we need to understand how these constraints will benefit us moving forward. This is extremely important in business, because no company has started from scratch and became an instant success overnight without and hurdles or constraints. Actually, it is the companies that sees theses constraints and uses them as a catalyst to push them into a better position that become successful. But, the main reason this part of the book stuck out to me is because it had a deeper meaning to me outside of business. I consider myself a positive person, so naturally I like to see the best out of a negative situation. But lately there has been a lot of negative things going on lately and it is hard to keep a positive outlook. So, when I read this it made me relearn how to properly look at constraints and move forward. And I believe that if more people would stop looking at constraints as something negative and start looking at them as something that they can grow from we would have a lot more people that are happy around us.

The second key point that I took away from this book was the section on creating abundance. The authors start off the section by comparing creating abundance and being resourceful, to improv theatre. In improv theatre the actors are given almost nothing to start out with and must create an amazing story. The actors look at the scarce offers of suggestions as a gift that gets the story going, instead of taking a victim’s mindset. Doing so they create a great story that they couldn’t have came up with on their own. In business there is the same scarcity of offers, but instead of suggestions from a crowd they are the resources that the business has. A successful business has people that are resourceful. Not the diluted word that means “can get things done, whatever the circumstances” but means “able to find and deliver resources, from anywhere, that we need and can use.” So, in order to become more resourceful, we must create abundance, which means finding new resources by creatively reframing what sources we have to maximize the value of them, then trading the value to receive the abundance we have. Basically, we have to create value in our scarce resources, then trade them to get access to the more resources we want. The book used Virgin America to explain this process. Virgin spent a lot of money creating this airline that would “put the glamour back into air travel”, and they did so by investing in the guest experience. But what they lacked to do was create a budget that had marketing in it. This lack of resources (money for marketing) created a constraint for them. They had to create abundance, they did this by combining the idea of glamour and partnered with Victoria’s Secret and doing the “first ever in-flight fashion show. This created a buzz around the airline and gave them more resources to work with.

A Beautiful Constraint is an amazing book to change the way you think. These are just two of the many key points I took away from this book. While it is a good book to make a business more successful, you might find a deeper understanding and become a more successful person.

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