From humble beginnings the Venetian republic grew in strength, along the way becoming highly efficient in building galleys for trade and defense.

The gulf between expectations and realities has been the subject of fascinating discussion in the modern corporate sector. Danny Miller's The Icarus Paradox, describes how business executives fly too high, fail to heed warnings to restrain their ambitions, and come crashing down. One example he gives is the decline, in the 1970s, of Control Data Corporation. This company succeeded in building faster computers than their larger competitors such as IBM, but overspecialization in computing speed led to weak overall performance. In situations such as these, senior executives frequently ignore advice to exercise caution. Miller recounts similar problems at Wang, Polaroid, ITT and others. Some, like Federal Express, staved off disaster by means of flexibility.

In A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting gives a sobering account of one society’s demise as a direct result of development. He relates in detail how the southern Pacific ocean’s Easter Islanders, remote from any other civilized society, slowly succumbed to the results of their ingenuity.