Large infrastructure projects fail in public and in detail, which makes them an unusually good teaching resource. Berlin Brandenburg, Heathrow Terminal 5, California high-speed rail: each produced a documented record of how scope, authority, and baselines came apart.
The point is not schadenfreude, and it is certainly not a claim that these outcomes were predictable at the time. It is that the failure modes are structural and they recur at every scale — fragmented decision rights, a baseline quietly reset, an integration nobody owned. A small operator will never build an airport. They will absolutely encounter the same mechanisms in a three-truck business, wearing different clothes.
