As someone in the medical device field, the concept of marketing/selling something before it exists is wild, explicitly illegal in the USA per the FDA. But here people have written checks for $400k off a sketch of a building. This causes 2 things:
1)enormous pressure to “ship it” on a less-than-ideal timeline.
2)the bean-counters’ perspective gets twisted since they got the “profits” up front, every additional dollar put into the building feels like it’s lost out of their pocket as opposed to the required investment to build the product.
That was also my immediate thought. However, what was the chance that the method they did use would end up not working? If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice? Also the article isn't clear to what extent the lean is responsible for the building not being finished.
You think they could sell a single unit in a tilted highrise? I don't see how risking your entire investment to save a few million with any significant chance of total failure could be +EV.
> If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice?
They made the wrong choice. The thing about statistical probability is there’s eventually a right answer - a 1 in X chance collapses into an outcome. They may have made a defensible choice given what they knew at the time, but we now know it was the wrong one.
(That said, I doubt the choice was a good one at the time, either. Wikipedia notes the expected construction budget at $273M, so for ~2% of the cost of the project, they sank the whole thing.)
What an absurd case of penny pinching.