TABLE OF CONTENTS "Typical. Just when you're getting ahead, someone changes the odds."
MacGyver, "Pegasus" episode, 1985, American Broadcasting Corporation
Turning limitations into opportunities is the single greatest factor that the 1,000 successful projects in the ESRM Survey had in common, and it is the subject of this chapter. Data from the survey showed that projects having limited or severely limited resources generally met with success. Limitations can come in many forms, both internally and externally. Internal examples include available employee labor, finances, machine time, and the like. External limitations can be more frustrating and are often more uncontrollable. These include regulatory roadblocks, working capital interest rates, shipping costs, technology swings, and so on. They can make or break entire industries. Understanding capacity and resource management is an important aspect of doing well in this continuous, life cycle process called business.
Finding innovative ways to work around limitations can mean survival, where the thrust of the engine is just enough to keep moving forward and where the fuel intake is just slightly less than the thrust output. Some situations are so dire or so complex that managing this level of thrust is quite an accomplishment and should be considered a huge win, even though the organization is barely surviving. That was the case with some real-estate developers in the mid-1990s in the eastern United States. Some multimillion-dollar developers were reduced to bankruptcy in a matter of months, as dot-com and biomedical organizations failed...
