The greatest projects always turn out to be the hardest to finish: the pyramids, the Brooklyn Bridge and rockets to the moon; networks of railroads, tunnels, highways, canals and airports; the massive infrastructure of electrical grids, water systems, broadcast networks and telecommunications. These engineering marvels make for some of the most inspiring stories in human history. They also offer valuable clues on how to navigate the turbulent waters of today's business environment.
How? Consider the story of one famous international infrastructure project. Proponents of this massive undertaking promised to speed up the flow of goods and services around the world, eliminate time and distance constraints on commerce, reduce costs for everyone and make investors fabulously wealthy. In its first years, the project raised millions of dollars, much of it from the public. Stock prices rocketed into the stratosphere. As the project proved harder than expected, however, markets crashed just as dramatically as they had soared. Minor setbacks and delays turned into years of stalled progress. And a cottage industry of journalists devoted to tracking the failings, blunders and arrogance of the project's promoters flourished.
That may sound like a synopsis of the Internet, but actually I am describing the Suez Canal, the 101-mile trench through Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The Suez created a permanent passage from the Red Sea to the now-bustling town of Port Said on the Mediterranean and was an engineering marvel on a global scale. Its construction had a revolutionary impact, making it possible to ship cargo between Europe and Asia without a long, dangerous detour around the southern tip of Africa.
The canal not only changed the nature of global commerce, but also played a starring role in the political fortunes of Britain, France and the Middle East. After more than a century of operation, five owners and a seven-year war that temporarily shut it down, the canal is still in operation. Nearly 14,000 vessels will journey through the desert this year alone, carrying more than 400 million tons of cargo and generating nearly $2 billion in revenue for the government of Egypt.
Today's effort to build commercial infrastructure in the form of digital channels like the World Wide Web is still in the early stages, perhaps only a few miles into its own trough. A review of the tortured history of its 19th-century predecessor can teach us much about what has happened so far and what we can expect over the many miles to come.
The Suez Canal almost didn't get built at all. French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps first proposed a canal in 1854, at a time when nearly all global trade traveled by sailboat and large-scale construction could be done only by hand. Doubts about the plan's feasibility and even the utility of a canal delayed the project until 1859. When it finally opened in 1869, the canal was six years late and had cost double its original budget of 200 million francs. Port Said had to be built from scratch on a narrow strip of beach. Along the way, Lesseps changed routes and, midway through the project, switched his principal technology (men with picks) to state-of-the-art dredgers and steam shovels. Machines cost twice as much, but they worked twice as fast.
Financing the canal proved almost as arduous as building it. Britain shipped three quarters of the goods that went around the Cape of Good Hope, and so presumably would benefit most from a canal. But when Lesseps approached the British, they professed skepticism that anyone - much less a Frenchman - could solve the engineering and financial problems inherent to such a giant undertaking. In 1857, British Prime Minister Henry Temple Palmerston savaged the project, calling it "the merest moonshine" and "among the many bubble schemes that from time to time have been palmed upon capitalists." The Edinburgh Review went further, proclaiming the canal would never "touch the grand commerce of the world," especially since "it is very questionable whether steamers will ever be able to compete with sailing vessels for goods traffic."
