A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

1 VICTIM, NEUTRALIZER, & TRANSFORMER

Our starting relationship with constraints

THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON:

1. How can we best assess our own starting relationship with constraints?
2. What are the keys to moving to a very different kind of relationship with constraints, one that would make us more able to take advantage of them?
3. What can a broader group of us learn from people who see constraints as inherently beneficial?

Constraint and ambition

Imagine you could develop a new system that enabled your business to use 50 percent less of your most precious resource, while at the same time driving 20 percent growth. Not a promise of future growth, but immediate growth. What would that be worth to you?

To increase output by double digits while halving inputs in one year—even in today's efficiency-obsessed economy—this, surely, is almost impossible. If a team had found a way to achieve it, we would know about it; they would be on the cover of every business magazine.

And yet, somehow, they are not.

But while modern drip irrigation may so far have failed to set the dinner tables of the Twitterati alight (you are welcome to try it this evening), it remains a remarkable and ongoing story of growth in the face of constraints.

Until the mid-1960s, the Kibbutz Hatzerim eked out a living farming in the Negev desert of Southern Israel (Negev is the Hebrew word for dry). Though committed to farming, they realized that to thrive they would need to bolster their fragile existence with a business alongside ...