Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ meant being recognized as a different kind of company, a change-minded maverick in a slow-moving industry. “Our families will say we work for a great company,” reads one of the company’s first 12 descriptions. “Our friends back East will mention that they have heard about DPR’s greatness,” says another.

      As DPR grew and prospered, its strategy and ideology remained constant, but its definitions of success grew decidedly more ambitious. “Over the next 30 years,” reads one of its more recent “vivid descriptions” of the future, “our people practices will be recognized as being as progressive and influential as Hewlett-Packard’s were over the last 50 years.” Reads another, “When it comes to quality and innovation, we will do for the construction industry what Toyota did for the auto industry.” And another: “Like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, our people and company will be known for being aggressive and ‘bullet smart.’”

      A construction company that aims to be thought of in the same breath as Toyota, Microsoft, and some of the legends of Silicon Valley? This is hardly conventional language in a business whose stereotype image includes the salty language of its employees—and that’s the point. “I’ve never wanted to be like everybody else,” says Woods. “I don’t want DPR to be like everybody else. We wanted to create a new culture, a new way of doing business in this industry.”

      Like Roy Spence’s ad agency, DPR is a company that believes firmly in the power of language and symbols. Painted on the walls of its offices in Redwood City are the slogans and rallying cries that get repeated at all the company’s offices around the country. “We exist to build great things,” one wall declares. “Smarter, faster, better, safer,” exclaims another. “Exceed all expectations,” urges a third.

      This strategic vocabulary is about more than just talk. One of the company’s core values is “ever forward”—basically, a commitment to keep pushing to get better, whether or not the marketplace demands it. “We believe in continual self-initiated change, improvement, learning, and the advancement of standards for their own sake.” To help translate that core value into an operating reality, the company named two “Ever Forward Champions”—staffers whose job is to measure DPR’s performance along its target goals, to share those results widely, and to keep developing new ways to improve the scores. The Ever Forward Champions play a key role in DPR’s “Global Learning Group,” an ambitious training program that steeps all 2,400 employees in both technical skills—budgeting, planning and scheduling, project management—and the fine points of DPR’s culture. Each employee is expected to spend at least 80 hours per year in these courses—again, not exactly standard operating procedure at most construction companies.

      It’s hard to overstate just how richly descriptive DPR is about virtually all aspects of its business and day-today work practices. It seems to have invented a piece of vocabulary to describe every nook and cranny of its strategy and future. DPR’s latest future-defining exercise is Mission 2030—a vivid picture of what the company will look like in 25 years—and a clear set of benchmarks along the way, defined as Base Camp 2010. (DPR will establish other interim Camps on the path to 2030.) One of the most ambitious goals: to increase each year the percentage of business DPR lands “without competition”—that is, clients who consider no other company to build their project. At present, that percentage stands at 33 percent of DPR’s business, a striking figure in an industry where competitive bids are as routine as coffee breaks.

      Why invest so much energy in building a vocabulary as opposed to just, say, building factories and laboratories for clients? “Because at the heart of every great company is a clear sense of purpose,” answers Peter Salvati, a senior DPR executive who works out of the company’s San Diego office and has played a lead role in Mission 2030. “One of the things I always have fun with—and I’ve probably done this with a hundred clients—is to suggest that they ask other construction companies, ‘Why does your company exist?’ You ought to be able to answer that about your own company. But so many people just look at one another, shrug their shoulders, and say, ‘To make money, I guess.’ It’s different for us.”

      Being different has made all the difference at DPR. There’s no question that the company has prospered by unleashing a disruptive business strategy in its industry. But the ultimate gauge of its performance, says Doug Woods, is how much influence it has on the rest of the industry. It all goes back to strategy as advocacy. Indeed, another goal for Base Camp 2010 is for DPR’s internal scorecard—detailed metrics about schedules, budgets, change orders, and the like—to become a generally accepted benchmark for the construction business as a whole.

      In other words, DPR wants its definitions of success to be adopted by its rivals as standard operating procedure. “If you really are building great things,” says Peter Salvati, “then people ought to be benchmarking themselves against you. They ought to be trying to emulate what you do.” Adds Doug Woods, “This is not about something internal at DPR. This is about being a force for transformation. We want to lead the industry to a different place.”

      That’s the essence of strategy and the logic of competition at every company we’ve visited in these two chapters—from ING Direct’s campus in Wilmington, Delaware, to Cranium’s fun-and-games headquarters in Seattle, to HBO’s building near the beach in Santa Monica, to our many stops in between. Sure, it may seem safer, more prudent, more conventional, to devise a game plan for your company that conforms to the generally accepted rules of how your industry works. But if that’s such a winning formula, why are so many industries in such dire straits? That simple question speaks to the long-term futility of a business formula based on strategy as mimicry. Back in chapter 1, ING Direct’s Arkadi Kuhlmann said it best with a question of his own: if you do things the way everybody else does them, why do you think you’re going to do any better?

      NOTES - CHAPTER TWO

      COMPETITON AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: DIRUPTORS, DIPLOMATS, ADN A NEW WAY TO TALK ABOUT BUSINESS

1. For a lively discussion of the most profound and productive lessons of the Internet boom, see the interview by George Anders, “Marc Andreessen, Act II,” Fast Company (February 2001). Another valuable interview is “On the Record: Marc Andreessen,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 2003. For helpful background on Tellme, see “A Telemarketer You Can Talk To” by Steve Rosenbush, BusinessWeek, June 22, 2004, and “Tech IPOs: Here Comes the Next Wave” by Justin Hibbard, BusinessWeek, March 7, 2005.

2. For a soft-spoken guy who doesn’t seek attention, Craig Newmark attracts plenty of it. Here is our list of the best writing about the company: “Craig$list.com” by Ryan Blitstein, San Francisco Weekly, November 30, 2005; “Guerilla Capitalism” by Adam Lashinsky, Fortune (November 29, 2005); “Web Board Craigslist Makes a Name for Itself ” by Janet Kornblum, USA Today, September 28, 2004; “Craig’s To-Do List: Leave Millions on the Table” by Matt Richtel, New York Times, September 6, 2004; and “The Craigslist Phenomenon” by Idelle Davidson, Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 13, 2004.

3. For an unblinking assessment of the turmoil facing the toys and games business, see “More Gloom on the Island of Lost Toy Makers” by Constance L. Hays, New York Times, February 23, 2005. For a case study on the birth and growth of Cranium, see “Inside the Smartest Little Company in America” by Julie Bick, Inc. (January 2002). For some philosophy on fun, families, and the Cranium formula, see “The Play’s the Thing” by Clive Thompson, New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2004.

4. The Wall Street Journal’s Jim Carlton revels in the СКАЧАТЬ