Have you heard about the Hoover Dam Bypass Project? The beautiful pictures can give you a small sense of what it's all about. The magnitude of this effort and the engineering challenges are clearly visible. Construction of the Colorado River Bridge (at left) is an inspirational view of what can be accomplished with the combination of vision and planning.
The Hoover Dam Bypass project is a 3.5 mile corridor connecting Arizona and Nevada with a new 4 lane roadway (U.S. Highway 93) that will span the Colorado River. Currently, the only way for traffic to cross the river is via the top of Hoover Dam - a winding route that was never intended to carry heavy traffic or large scale trucking. Over the past 50 years, this tourist route has become an increasingly critical north-south connection for commercial traffic and was even designated official status as a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Route. The project to upgrade the river crossing with a true highway started in 2001 is just now reaching it's final stages.
This all just makes us wonder about the team that had the vision, the ambition, the gall to say, "let's just build a new bridge, in the middle of the desert, 1,000 feet above the Colordao River. It will take 10 years and there will be many bureaucratic hurdles, but we should still do it." Most of the people and organizations we work with struggle to think about long term plans and shy away from the risks inherent in taking on anything that seems impossible at first blush.
What's happened to our ambition? Great products often come from solutions that tackle a problem head on, rather than those that tinker around the edges without taking any big risks. Let this image of a seemingly insane solution remind us to be ambitious and think big about what's really possible.
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