Matter. Julie Williamson
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href="#ulink_a1131373-b6f6-56eb-9be6-44856d0220de">HOW DO YOU BUILD THE CAPABILITY TO DELIVER MORE VALUE, YEAR AFTER YEAR?
When Doug Woods, Peter Nosler, and Ron Davidowski (the D, P, and R of DPR) founded their company in 1990, they knew they wanted it to matter in the construction industry. They wanted to be a force for positive change on multiple fronts.
• First, DPR wanted to change the way clients engaged with their general contractors (GCs). Traditionally, clients and GCs have had notoriously poor relationships, plagued by missed expectations, litigation, and substandard outcomes. DPR wanted to engage with clients in a way that improved the quality of their clients’ experience while also improving on-time and on-budget project delivery.
• Second, DPR wanted to change the way it engaged both its staff and its contractors. In the “Vivid Description” outlined in its core ideology, DPR sets an ambitious goal that “over the next 30 years our people practices will be recognized as being as progressive and influential as Hewlett Packard’s were over the last 50 years.”3
• Finally, DPR wanted to change the communities it served, by building great things with great business partners.
Consider that DPR has grown from a startup in the 1990s to a $3 billion success story, and has become the obvious choice for companies like Facebook and Genentech looking to partner with a GC to “build great things.” At the same time, it has been included on multiple “Best Companies to Work For” lists (including for Millennials),4 and has given millions of dollars to charity through its DPR Foundation. We think it is fair to say that DPR matters—to its clients, its employees and contractors, and its communities.
How does it manage to do this, not once, but year over year? By consistently identifying the best opportunities to solve more complex problems and then doing the hard work required to solve them. In DPR’s case, the leadership team members readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect, but they lean into the complexity of the most technical construction projects and they dedicate themselves to leading the industry in its understanding of innovative new approaches, redefining best practice as they go, with a commitment to delivering more valued outcomes to their clients.
DPR’s leadership team does something that we consistently saw in the companies we studied. To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions. Companies that matter don’t just talk about opportunities to create more value; they do the hard work required to actually convert those opportunities to demonstrate value. When complex problems emerge at the edge of disruption—where the future meets the past—these companies don’t shy away from the challenge, trying to protect a legacy business model. They are willing to take risks to develop and refine a new way forward. And they don’t do it just for themselves.
Companies that matter talk incessantly about legacy and doing the right thing. They are committed to creating value for their clients and for their industry and communities as well. They see it as their role to ensure that everyone—even their competitors— and the community are better today than they were yesterday. Companies that leave their customers, employees, and communities better off by delivering the most valued solutions have an elevated impact.
DPR has an elevated impact because its leaders chose to work differently with their clients, their contractors, and their communities. The founders wanted to challenge how its business worked at the most basic level—the contracting relationship between the buyer of a building and its builder. They had been in the industry long enough to see all the problems with the existing litigious model, and decided to change the game by elevating their impact and redefining the contracting process.
To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions.
That couldn’t happen in isolation. DPR had to have great relationships with people of influence within the right client organizations who had the vision and ability to build great buildings. It had to vest its financial interests with the success of the project, putting more skin in the game and helping to pioneer new ways to partner. And it had to connect well beyond the client, to bring bankers, employees, subcontractors, and even universities along on the journey. When DPR’s founders stood back and looked at the impact they were trying to have, they saw that they needed to influence the entire industry and market, so they built the broad relationships required to do just that.
They needed to have elevated relationships—relationships that gave them influence with people who had the ability to make decisions, partnerships to provide the deep knowledge of the nuances and cultural realities inside their client organizations, and connections to people and ideas required to create solutions to one of the most complex problems in their industry: the contracting relationship itself.
Companies that matter elevate relationships with their customers and throughout their industry. They are the go-to companies when an industry voice is needed, and they have the ability to pull together market-wide conversations to focus on innovation and collaboration. At the same time, companies that matter can support intimate and nuanced discussions with their clients about the client’s strategies, challenges, and future. In other words, through their relationships, they influence, partner, and connect better than anyone else in the industry. Their relationships are part of what enables them to have an elevated impact.
DPR’s edge of disruption these days is its adoption of Integrated Project Delivery and risk-sharing models that are redrawing the lines between client, designer, and general contractor. DPR knows where its edge of disruption is because, like other companies that matter, it chooses intentionally and methodically to define it, learn about it, and then share what it has learned. DPR creates a point of view on emerging disruptions and sees the value that can be delivered to its clients and partners, who in turn seek DPR’s point of view whenever possible. DPR’s team has been able to build a reputation powerful enough to give them access to the most senior decision makers and influencers in its industry. The company’s elevated perspective creates the access and credibility required to support its elevated relationships, which combine to show DPR’s leadership the path to having an elevated impact. And therein lies the map for your journey to become the obvious choice:
• Establish your elevated perspective by defining your edge of disruption and learning and sharing as much as you can about it.
• Use your elevated perspective to build credibility and gain the access you need to develop elevated relationships.
• Go deep with your customers and connect the dots between disruption and opportunity, and you will have the understanding and influence required to have an elevated impact.
• Lean into the complexity required to solve higher-value problems, and answer the call to act in a way worthy of your leadership position.
• Do these things and you will be able to create more value for your customers, move beyond your competition, and as a result, become the obvious choice in your market, year after year. You will matter more.
Whether your clients are internal or external, large or small, local or global, you and your team can all move to do work that matters and build a company that matters. We are not saying it is easy, but it can be done. Join us and explore how you can develop the capabilities required to have an elevated perspective, elevated relationships, and elevated impact, and become the obvious choice. You will be inspired by the examples of others, and rejuvenated by the possibilities that emerge for you, your role, and your business as we progress. Read on!
IMAGINE YOU JUST ORDERED A PIZZA. Domino’s