How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg

BUILD WITH LEGO Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them. Decoration aside, that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cake. As with wedding cakes, so with solar and wind farms, server farms, batteries, container shipping, pipelines, roads. They’re all profoundly modular, built with a basic building block. They can scale up like crazy, getting better, faster, bigger, and cheaper as they do. The small cake is the Lego brick—the basic building block—of the wedding cake. The solar panel is the Lego of the solar farm. The server is the Lego of the server farm. This potent little idea has been applied to software, subways, hardware, hotels, office buildings, schools, factories, hospitals, rockets, satellites, cars, and app stores. Its applicability is limited only by imagination. So what’s your Lego? (See chapter 9.)