Building a Bad Reputation: Then Make It Lean

August 9th, 2004 by Hal

The August 8, 2004, Sunday Edition of the New York Times ran a story Building a Bad Reputation: Sloppy American Construction, Julie V. Iovine. The story appeared in the Arts and Design section. [You'll need to move fast to read the article. The NYT only makes their stories available for about 1 week. If you haven't registered with the site, then you'll have to do that before viewing.]

This story will make its way around the AEC and real estate industries. Ms. Iovine is saying publicly what many architects have been saying about contractors and the subcontractor workforce for years.

"Got a gaping one-inch space between frame and window? Just fill it in with silicone and call it a day. Not perfectly flush or plumb? Who cares!"

But she doesn't stop there. She's also saying what contractors have been saying about architects.

"(T)he architect's reputation for meticulous standards was so daunting that some 50 contractors had refused to bid on the job."

Is our industry broken? Do we have a bad reputation among foreign designers? While it may be an exception, some people in the industry are up for the challenge.

"At first there was this big fear that the kind of quality possible in Japan was impossible here. Some of us took that as a challenge to achieve the equivalent level of craftsmanship."

There is something foreign designers value about the American way.

"The team spirit in the U.S. is exceptional. Once they are in front of a challenge, they rise to it. It was a pure American effort."

I suspect poor quality persists due to the way we manage.

Here's what I make of the situation. In the U.S.A. we do not have a value for and practice of learning and innovating on the jobsite. Too often we buy out the job by awarding pieces to subcontractors on a lowest price basis. Those subcontractors hire other specialist subcontractors each offering their lowest price. We do this in an attempt to optimize the cost of the job. Instead, we get sub-optimization of systems and the project as a whole. Further, we bring strangers together and make no effort to build relationships. Why bother? Labor is labor? We can replace one person with another without negative consequences to the job. And that's where we are wrong.

We can make concrete that has "the airless density of a flourless chocolate cake." We can form that concrete so the finish can be polished. And we even can design, fabricate, and install curtain wall systems to tight tolerances. But we can't do any of that reliably without fundamentally changing what we value from our construction activities. And that goes for the architects too. They must bring construction folk into the earliest stages of design if they want a design that is constructable to their intentions.

I see the lean approach transforming the AEC industry.

I suspect poor quality persists due to the way we manage. The story of Toyota's entry to the U.S.A. is instructive. Toyota took GM's worst plant in Freemont, CA, where there were reported to be more worker grievances than in the rest of GM combined. That plant is also where they had low quality and high recalls. Giving up, GM closed the plant. Toyota came in and hired back a large group of the workforce but not the management. Instead, Toyota infused the workforce with the Toyota DNA. Then together management and workers designed the plant operations. The Corollas that come off that line are equally good as those from Japan.

Ms. Iovine interviewed Dana Buntrock, author of "Japanese Architecture as a Collaborative Process". Ms. Buntrock, just up the road from Toyota, said quality is tied to wealth. But she's changing her mind.

"Now I am beginning to wonder if well-built architecture occurs only at a very fragile economic moment. You need not only affluence, but a group of people who are well paid enough to remain in the crafts and building trades even though they are intelligent, and you need the overall size of an architectural project to remain relatively small."

I'm more optimistic than Ms. Buntrock. Just as the lean approach has made Toyota a powerhouse and competitors their imitators, I see the lean approach transforming the AEC industry. And it is well on its way in northern California, just a few miles from Toyota's Freemont facility. Read the August 7, 2004 story appearing in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal Sutter Health Tells It's Builders, "Make It Lean".

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One Response to “Building a Bad Reputation: Then Make It Lean”

Mark C. Zweig Says:
August 10th, 2004 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for pointing out this very interesting article, Hal. I don’t disagree with any of your conclusions about where the process goes wrong. Integrated design builders have long been saying (with an almost religious fervor) that they have the answers…I think they have SOME of the answers SOME of the time but certainly not all of ‘em.

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