Flag Waving
/Admittedly, this post is mainly for me to help keep track of how this blog is doing. It is part of my learning how to work this blog-thing. I hope you know that I am trying to get good at this. As it turns out, this is the pinnacle of my thinking about a 40-year career in Construction and I want to do it well.
That said, this site has had 213 visits in the last five months from 35 countries. I presume that not all of those were from robots. I did receive one comment recently asking for the name of my book. Well, I didn’t write a book. Not yet anyway. I will make the corrections necessary so that readers aren’t expecting a book any time soon.
The topic, cooperation, is both growing and surrounded by associated topics with significant growth. Especially Lean Construction. The underpinning of Lean is the Toyota Way -you know- eliminate waste, just-in-time assembly, team building, etc. Underneath those procedures is improved profit. The underpinnings of Cooperative Construction include improved profit as well, but it is really about behaving well as societal members. Societal members who have been given large resources and commanding roles in the appearance, function and utility or our built environment. These are people who feel a reasonable responsibility to build the infrastructure of society in an efficient and proper manner. They feel that less contention and more cooperation is the hallmark of such a goal.
Things are still plenty competitive. The process is lead by cooperation. All at the same time, everyone together competes with entropy anyway. A brutal competitor, entropy. The industry has plenty of openings for entropy.
The responsibility in these folks arise partly from the amount of consumption of resources. We, the construction industry are the fifth largest industry in the country in terms of overall budget. $ 1.2 trillion, yearly. Employing 6.7 million people. That is only 4% of Gross Domestic Product but 6% of the employees. It takes a lot of people to build a building and that is a good thing. Except now when there is a shortage.
Anyway, I submit that it all will run better under a cooperative approach.