Freedom

Concrete Construction, April, 2003 by William D. Palmer, Jr.

Perhaps the most important business freedom we have in the United States is the freedom to fail. Any company that is inefficient or that is making a product or providing a service not in demand will soon be gone. There's no one to protect it, no one to bail it out (unless it's an airline or an auto company). But the complement is what keeps this country economically strong: we are then free to start over. There's no one to tell us what we should do. We're free to come up with a new great idea, free to adapt that idea to meet a need and to test it against the hard rock of the marketplace.

This would seem to argue for the adversarial approach to the organization of construction projects--the low bidder will be the most adaptable and the most efficient, and the weak will die off at the expense of the strong. But that approach is effective only if the single goal is tomorrow's bottom line. What I see happening in the concrete construction business is the opposite. Coalitions are arising everywhere; people and companies with different skills and different interests are working together to build a strong, sustainable industry that produces a high-quality product.

Take, for example, a contentious issue I've written about before: floor moisture problems. To take on this problem in a straightforward way, the Inter-Industry Working Group on Concrete Floor Issues (which this magazine is cosponsoring with ASCC, the SDC, and Construction Technology Laboratories) will convene in April. Representatives from the concrete industry and the flooring industry will explore how we can work together to produce more successful floors. We've argued endlessly on jobsites and in courtrooms over whose fault it is when a floor fails, now we're going to talk about solutions instead of blame.

At CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION, our primary effort to foster this cooperation and learning is the CEO Leadership Forum. Held every summer (this year from July 24 to 26 in Colorado Springs), the leaders of concrete construction companies get together to talk about the things that only another concrete contractor can understand. Contractors large and small learn from one another what works and what doesn't. We also have a lot of fun with a great group of people.

I don't feel that all this teamwork is at odds with the failure principle. Cooperation and teamwork are really nothing more than smart business. In fact, the successful contractors are the ones forming teams, and those who are so narrow-minded that they take a confrontational approach are the casualties. As long as a quality job and the long-term sustainability of our industry are the real goals, then the truly strong will indeed be the survivors.