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

8 CONSTRAINT-DRIVEN CULTURES

How big companies have learned to love constraints

THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON:

1. Are there examples of large companies that now routinely embrace constraints…
2. … even if they have little history of doing so?
3. Are their methods replicable for those without experience in doing it?

This book is neither a paean to brilliant mavericks nor a buffet of hacks for cash-strapped start-ups. It describes a way for everyone to progress, regardless of size, including large companies.

But so far much of the discussion has been about individuals and teams, albeit sometimes as part of bigger organizations. So can this really work at a more systemic level in a large organization? More particularly, can one teach a large organizational dog new cultural tricks—if a company has not behaved in this inventive way historically, is there any evidence that these behaviors can be acquired and embraced late in life, and with real impact?

In this chapter, we are going to look at three large companies which are not simply embracing the constraints they encounter, but actively seeking them out. They are doing this partly because they have seen the power of constraints to repeatedly spark invention and business advantage, and partly because they have seen the future and the pressure for change it will bring. They see that the scarcity we discussed in the introduction is impacting their businesses now, and that the abundance they seek is, in large part, reliant on the transformation of ...