Previously, I shared lessons from the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal. In this article: how the Americans nearly repeated those mistakes and what finally turned things around. President Theodore Roosevelt was enthusiastic about what a canal could do for America’s growth. "Make the dirt fly!" was his mantra, and he made sure everyone he appointed understood what was at stake. Unfortunately, his first Chief Engineer, John Wallace, took those words as literal mar

Imagine running a growing company and competing fiercely with your biggest rival. An opportunity arises to buy a highly valuable piece of land. But there are two big obstacles: • First, the land straddles the border between Honduras and Guatemala, with two different people claiming ownership. • Second, your competitor is also desperate to buy it, deploying an army of lawyers to prove who really owns it. What would you do? That was the problem Samuel Zemurray faced as owner

Ed Roland, lead singer and songwriter for Collective Soul, recently shared two stories that reveal how working with constraints shaped his music career. And it turns out innovators in any field can learn from Ed’s approach. External Constraints   For eight years in the 1980s, Roland worked as a sound engineer at a small studio, while constantly writing his own songs. But when it came to recording them, he faced an age-old problem: no money. Back then, studios relied on expens