Matter. Julie Williamson
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that matter the most, but unless someone has the courage to step out and bring their customers and the market together, those problems won’t get solved effectively.
The same is true in complex organizations. Perhaps you are trying to improve from within. Engaging people outside your team—your internal customers and your larger organization— to co-create a solution can be effective, but don’t expect results overnight. You may have to authentically be in it for the long haul to create something that matters. Homeplus was able to test a new go-to-market approach with a few weeks of a strong marketing campaign supported by a reasonably isolated technology infrastructure, and it generated results that matter. We aren’t saying it always takes years; however, don’t be afraid of the solutions that do require more effort and time.
As you work to learn about your edge of disruption, you may find you have more questions than answers. You may not even have the problem fully defined. GHX is exceptionally good at co-creating a problem definition and solutions with its customers and its market, and we recommend you consider this approach as you work to learn about your edge. Another approach is to make sure you “know what you know.” This takes a commitment to catalog and leverage your organizational knowledge and expertise to continually push forward on the edge of disruption, which helps you to learn as much as you can about the value you can create. And we haven’t found many companies that know what they know better than DPR.
If you were to meet Doug Woods at a shopping center, you would think he was a knockabout kind of guy. Someone who attends every one of his son’s football games, cooks good ribs, and appears to be in the manual trades. You certainly wouldn’t think that he, and the company he cofounded, might have built the very shopping center you were in, and more likely built the highly complex data center that the retail brands in the shopping center use to give you that special loyalty discount you crave so much. Oh, and you probably wouldn’t think that his company also may have built the high-tech science laboratory that sits next to the very field on which he likes to watch his son play football.
Doug Woods is a shockingly humble guy, which we are convinced is part of the reason that DPR (as we noted in the Introduction, he is the D in DPR) has a sustained discipline of seeking feedback, learning from its experiences, and pushing “ever forward” to matter more to its customers tomorrow than it does today.
Through our conversations with DPR, we discovered that you can often learn a tremendous amount about your edge of disruption when you look right in front of you: at your people, your suppliers, your contractors, and your customers. They all have experiences that help you to better understand your edge of disruption. It takes courage and humility to ask about those experiences, learn from them, and synthesize them to find and stay at your own edge.
The construction industry is known for its rough-and-tumble, almost cutthroat contracting processes. In the thick of deeply rooted industry assumptions about contractors, the bidding process, and how work gets done, DPR has managed to challenge everything.
DPR is a $3 billion technical construction company that was founded in 1990. For five years in a row starting in 2010, DPR ranked on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, landing in the top ten in 2014. The Huffington Post included DPR in its list of “10 Companies College Students Should Want to Work For,” alongside companies like Google and Zappos.4 Even more astonishing, as of 2015, DPR received more than 80 percent of its business from referrals. DPR was so clearly the obvious choice for certain clients that 25 percent of them (and in some years as many as one-third) engaged DPR to deliver multimillion-dollar projects without undergoing competitive bidding. That’s definitely not the norm in DPR’s industry.
To truly appreciate DPR’s accomplishment, you need to understand a little more about the construction industry’s bidding process. Like many industries that run on competitive bidding, construction has over the years become a game where some contractors bid low to win the work and anticipate making up money in change orders later on—a game that is avidly supported by some customers who pit contractors against each other to drive down price, without regard for the actual cost of the program. The bidding process has become a deeply held assumption in the industry, making DPR’s “no-bid” awards in a highly commoditized industry unusual and impressive. Pushing back on clients’ procurement-oriented process, the company built strong, enduring, strategic partnerships to benefit clients and deliver better project outcomes.
This was one of DPR’s most valuable moves to its edge of disruption. It set out to fundamentally redefine the way GCs and clients partnered to build great things. DPR was on a one-way mission to break the traditionally adversarial nature of the industry in which the three cofounders had spent their lives, and it wanted to create a company that did it better than anyone else. For DPR, this edge consisted of three key elements. First, it specifically focuses on technical construction in partnership with customers. DPR set out from its very inception to live at the edge of building construction and strived to seek and accept only work that was technical and complex in nature. Second, it is determined to be “ever forward.” If a new and better way to do something emerges on the fringe of the industry, DPR embraces it. It believes in continual self-initiated change, improvement, learning, and advancement of standards for their own sake. For example, DPR is constantly taking new technology such as building information modeling from the edge of disruption and creating better outcomes for its clients in the process. And finally, DPR very purposefully encourages different models for contracting. The traditional bidding and contracting process itself was at times in conflict with building partnerships, and was a causal factor in the adversarial nature of the business. DPR refused to comply with the status quo and, with every opportunity over the years, continued to guide its clients, and increasingly the industry, in a more collaborative direction.
How did DPR pull that off? It’s not because DPR is the only general contractor in its space (it’s not) or because DPR has some proprietary way to build (it doesn’t). And it isn’t because Doug Woods, DPR cofounder, is a nice guy who is completely committed to his company (although he is). It’s because DPR has spent time and energy making sure it is very clear about the type of clients it wants to work with (more on this in Chapter 4), and is always looking out to the future for ways to matter more. We’re going to talk more about its approach to customers in Section Two, “Elevated Relationships.” For now, though, let’s consider how DPR knows what it knows, and how it uses that to challenge its assumptions about how work gets done.
DPR purposefully and methodically captures knowledge inside and outside the organization for subsequent use. It includes everyone in its collection process, even its customers and subcontractors. Its ongoing push to learn keeps the company continually on the edge of disruption in its industry when it comes to customer satisfaction, and it supports DPR’s unique approach to project delivery and its overall business. How? Because it always works to understand what works and what doesn’t, and that stops it from making assumptions about how work gets done. At the same time, its processes are visible to its customers, giving buyers the confidence to know that DPR is using the most relevant processes and techniques to build great buildings.
You can’t learn from your expertise if you don’t know what it is or where it exists inside your organization.
Think about it for a minute. You can’t learn from your expertise if you don’t know what it is or where it exists inside your organization. DPR is obsessed with cataloging and registering everything it knows. An obvious way DPR catalogs knowledge is simply by doing more than most companies do to solicit client impressions and perceptions. When we visited DPR’s office in Redwood City, California, to interview senior leaders, everyone we met seemed to be either coming out of a feedback session or heading into one. One executive was conducting a customer satisfaction survey with his client on a recent project. When he asked the client to rate its project compared to previous experiences, the client said that DPR was not only the best GC experience he had ever had, but the best customer service experience, period. Not