Managing Through the Marshmallow Challenge

One marshmallow. Twenty spaghetti noodles. Eighteen minutes. And go. 

For Jintong Tang, Ph.D., entrepreneurship is best learned by doing. This is why her management class in the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business goes beyond presentations and textbooks and, instead, looks at starting and running a business from the lens of musical compositions, popular television shows, and something known as the marshmallow challenge.

“Each team has 18 minutes to build the tallest, freestanding structure with 20 spaghetti sticks, tape and strings,” Tang said. “The goal is to make the marshmallow stand on top of the freestanding structure.”

What sounds like a simple task often ends in failure for the participants, though.

Of the four structures made in Tang’s class this semester, only two stood by the end of the session. Why does this happen? Tang explains that this activity, used everywhere from grade school classrooms to Fortune 500 companies, is consistently performed the most successfully by kindergarteners and least successfully by business school students.

“The reason is the importance of prototyping,” Tang explained. “Kindergarteners will build a very short structure and then put a marshmallow on top, and it stays. Then they will make it a little taller, put the marshmallow on top, and it stays.”

Business school students, on the other hand, are often so focused on planning that they don’t think about the effect the marshmallow will have once placed on top, she said.

“Most people believe the marshmallow doesn’t weigh anything or wouldn’t change anything,” Tang said. “So they would spend a lot of time planning and building the structure without ever actually trying to put the marshmallow on top.”

Carson Lofton, a junior in the Chaifetz School of Business, found the challenge went beyond just a simple spaghetti structure.

“The marshmallow challenge demonstrates to people of all ages and walks of life that a little planning and a lot of creativity and you can accomplish the task at hand,” he said. “It really has to do with balance; what’s the perfect combination of risk to reward, or planning to actually building?”

In addition to the marshmallow challenge, Tang’s MGT 3200 class participates in challenges that stretch their understanding of entrepreneurship. In the “Yada Yada Yada” class session, students watch clips from “Seinfeld” depicting business ideas created by a character and then evaluate these ideas by discussing the differences between hunches/ideas and business opportunities. In another session, students use Legos and make puzzles to explore the differences between entrepreneurial and managerial thinking.

For one of the ongoing projects in the course, students must create and execute a business opportunity. With $10 seed funding, each team aims to make as much profit as possible, legally and ethically. The team making the most profit wins and gets all of the profits from the other teams.

“One comment I receive a lot from my students is that I keep pushing them outside of their comfort zones,” Tang said. “I feel happy to see that because that’s my goal. We want to keep pushing you outside your comfort zone to get you better prepared for the real world.”

Take the Marshmallow Challenge

Supplies

• 20 spaghetti noodles
• One marshmallow
• One yard of masking tape
• One yard of string

Directions

1. Set your materials out on a flat surface.
2. Set a timer for 18 minutes.
3. Use the materials to build a freestanding structure that could hold a marshmallow on top.
4. The tallest structure that successfully holds the marshmallow on top wins.

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