Something from Nothing Leaves Something

How Strategy Choice can Make Something out of Very Little

Source: A&M Records

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 #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 of crime rate. It has truly awesome food and great architecture.

And it is incredibly prosperous. The IMF ranks it as the second highest GDP/capita country in the world. I rank it first because the only one ahead, Liechtenstein, is a medium-sized town of 40K, not a real country (similarly for sub-one million population jurisdictions like Luxembourg, Macao or Brunei). Singapore may be small at 6.1 million population, but it is bigger than Ireland or Norway, other famously high-GDP countries. Its 2025 GDP/capita is estimated at $157K, which is 74% higher than the US. (Though US shouldn’t feel too bad. It is clearly harder to have a very high GDP/capita if you are a large country (+25M population). The US GDP/capita is 22% higher than the next biggest consequential country, Germany.)

Some may argue that you should compare a city like Singapore to entire countries because there are lots of very rich cities. But even by that standard, Singapore is impressive. The highest GDP/capita of any other large city is San Francisco at $145K — 8% lower than Singapore — and after San Francisco there is a steep drop-off. The only sizable place richer is Silicon Valley at $210K GDP/capita, 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 from where it came. 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/capita at the time was estimated to be US$516 or just under $4K in 2025 dollars, around the same as the current level for 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.

But it then proceeded to grow its GDP/capita at a 6.3% CAGR 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 US, 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, 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 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 Jordon, 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 when you have a resource advantage over competition, look to invest in the most expensivesources of competitive advantage.

Something from Nothing

But if you are at a major resource disadvantage — like Singapore as of 1965 — the imperative is to seek sources of advantage that are cheap and doable for you, but tricky for competition to follow — not an easy strategy choice task.

That was the brilliance of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister from prior to 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 is flexibility. Singapore 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. Lee Kuan Yew 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 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-dollar 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 and 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 that of our leading competitor, and we were running a deficit on that tiny budget. The school was hemorrhaging professors to US schools because the Canadian dollar had plummeted from 87¢ to 67¢ over the previous several years, leaving Rotman salaries uncompetitive relative to US 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, which we transformed 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 at which 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 US, 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 are there are only nine and ten, respectively), the biggest and most important annual tournaments after the four Grand Slams (US 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 centibillionaire Larry Ellison with unlimited investment resources.

We were able 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 assets 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, the dean’s love and affection. The second is cheap but valuable assets 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.