The trend of hotels removing bathroom doors isn't just about saving on the door itself. It's a strategic move to eliminate cascading operational expenses, including higher energy bills from windowless rooms, maintenance for jammed doors, and the space required for ADA-compliant doors.

Holcim's sustainability strategy isn't just PR. By reformulating products to use cheaper, CO2-friendly raw materials and alternative fuels, the company creates significant cost advantages. This makes their eco-friendly products a source of profitable growth, not just an added expense, challenging the 'green premium' concept.

Counterintuitively, data centers in arid regions like Arizona can be a net positive. They generate up to 50 times more tax revenue per gallon of water used than industries like golf, making them a highly efficient economic replacement.

Colorado's Monarch Mountain has 100% of its terrain open by using simple fences to capture wind-blown snow. This highlights how low-tech, adaptive solutions can be more resilient and cost-effective than capital-intensive technology like artificial snowmaking, especially when critical resources like water are scarce due to drought.

By servicing maintenance club members during the slow "shoulder season," businesses free up their schedules. This creates capacity to take on new, high-margin customers when demand inevitably spikes, maximizing growth opportunities instead of just servicing existing clients.

Steve Levitt proposes a new golf scoring system that heavily weights eagles and birdies while giving zero points for double bogeys or worse. This incentivizes risk-taking and focuses players on their best moments, not their worst holes. It's a design principle for any activity: optimize the rules for user enjoyment.

The entrepreneurs behind the 1930s mini golf boom demonstrated extreme resourcefulness. Some strategically located their courses directly underneath large, illuminated billboards. This scrappy tactic allowed them to operate their businesses at night without incurring any costs for electricity, maximizing their slim profit margins.

The economic crash of the 1930s paradoxically created ideal conditions for a miniature golf craze. Plunging real estate prices opened up vacant urban lots for entrepreneurs, while widespread unemployment fueled immense public demand for cheap, accessible forms of entertainment and distraction.

To survive inconsistent snowfall from climate change, ski resorts like Vail pre-sell the majority of lift tickets via season passes. This secures revenue upfront, shifting their business model to be more like a sports team that gets paid regardless of its on-field performance, ensuring financial stability even in low-snow years.