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

We live in a world of seemingly ever-increasing constraints, driven as much by an over-abundance of choices and connections as by a scarcity of time and resources. Underpinned by the latest research from social science, the authors interviewed individuals and teams all of whom had turned apparent constraints into sources of possibility and advantage. This summary transforms what they’ve learned from their interviews into a toolkit to enable you to make more from less, describing the mindset, method, and motivation you can use to make constraints a source of inspiration rather than asphyxiation.

We live in a world of seemingly ever-increasing constraints, driven as much by an over-abundance of choices and connections as by a scarcity of time and resources. How we respond to these constraints is one of the most important issues of our time, and will be a large determinant of our future progress as people, businesses, and citizens of our planet.

Our summary of A Beautiful Constraint, by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, is a practical handbook about everyday inventiveness, designed for the constrained times in which we live. Underpinned by the latest research from social science, the authors interviewed individuals and teams in disciplines as diverse as education, automobile engineering, marketing, supply-chain management, and agriculture, all of whom had turned apparent constraints into sources of possibility and advantage.

Morgan is the author of Eating The Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, the international best-seller that introduced the concept of challenger brands to the world of marketing. He is founder of eatbigfish, a renowned marketing consultancy that works with clients to develop their own breakthrough strategies. Barden runs the West Coast business for eatbigfish in the U.S. He is a popular speaker whose advice on how to create breakthrough thinking with outsize results has helped all types of businesses.

This summary transforms what they’ve learned from their interviews into a toolkit to enable you to make more from less, describing the mindset, method, and motivation you can use to make constraints a source of inspiration rather than asphyxiation.