Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning of “megaprojects,” huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes, the Olympics. He’s spent decades studying the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right. His new book How Big Things Get Done, is summarized in The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 4-5, 2023).

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly. They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”

His work can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:

• 47.9% are delivered on budget. 
• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time. 
• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa Spain is a rare example of proper project planning

Flyvbjerg found that the complexity, novelty and difficulty of megaprojects heighten their risk and leave them vulnerable to extreme outcomes.  “You shouldn’t expect that they will go bad,” he says. “You should expect that quite a large percentage will go disastrously bad. Despite the fact that trillions of dollars had been spent around the world on such projects, nobody knew if they stayed on schedule or budget.”

McDonald’s has a new Texas restaurant with no tables or seats or bathrooms for customers and a conveyor belt that routes food to drivers who order ahead. Chipotle also offers no place for customers to sit inside an Ohio restaurant that only takes digital orders. Taco Bell is evaluating a new design that features 4 drive-through lanes, double the typical two. Starbucks,  which long described itself as a “third place” for customers to gather after home and work, plans to add 400 U.S. stores with only delivery or pickup service in the next 3 years.

Taco Bell is testing a 4-lane drive through in Minnesota

America’s biggest restaurant companies made a bet during the pandemic that you would rather eat the food cooked on their premises someplace else. Now they are gambling you will want to do so for years to come. The strategy from these giant chains is to orient their operations around drive-throughs and online ordering while testing new restaurant concepts that only serve food to go, reports The Wall Street Journal (Jan.28-29, 2023). They say these designs will make them more profitable and efficient since restaurants that bring fewer customers inside cost less to build, maintain and staff.

Cadillac Celestiq’s new “ultra-luxury” $300,000+ vehicle has more

than 100 3-D printed parts

Now that much of the hype around 3-D printing has died down—no more of that 2010s-era talk about a Star Trek-style replicator in every home—a funny thing is happening to this technology. It’s becoming a widely used, and in some respects quietly revolutionary, update to the way that people manufacture and process things we rely on every day—from cars to industrial machinery to food. “What’s more, the way this technology is being used could have implications for the shape of global supply chains to come,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 14-15, 2023).

3-D printing, also known as “additive manufacturing,” generally works by adding tiny layers of material—usually powdered metal or plastic—one at a time to form an item, and fusing them with binding agents, lasers or other methods. Thus, parts are “grown” instead of forged, cast, molded, or machined as in traditional manufacturing. Just a decade ago, this kind of manufacturing was, with rare exceptions, suitable only for creating prototypes. What’s different now is that newer technology lets these systems print objects strong enough to be used in finished products—and relatively quickly.