Cooperation and Lean

These two books are the guiding lights of Cooperative Construction. Joining them together is the purpose of my work as my long and checkered career in construction focuses on this, my “capstone project.”

These are the two Books that are the backbone of my Site.

Lean Construction is the way of the future. It is going to dominate the process of efficient construction, Lean will lead the industry out of the long, painful, wasteful past into the bright light of the future. If you don’t think so, just look out your window and count the number of Toyota cars you see. Lean Construction is essentially the Toyota Way adopted to the construction industry. In one of the few brilliant sea changes in construction, two fellas created Lean out of whole cloth. Their stories of the founders, Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell, are now legend in the Lean Construction Institute. https://www.leanconstruction.org/about-us/lci-tenets/history/ which has, for example, yearly conventions with 3,000 or more enthusiastic attendees. The story of Glenn and Greg’s work is way beyond the scope of this blog entry, but it will come back as we keep working on this project.

The advocates, and I am one, of Lean get a little out of hand, but not too much. You know how believers are. In fact, I have two belief structures and the combination is amazing.Robert Axelrod’s 1980 book, The Evolution of Cooperation has changed my life as much as Lean Construction. The combination of the two concepts is what I call, Cooperative Construction. Lean Construction is the method of building our future and the power of cooperation is the engine that will drive it.

If you will please excuse my leaping around from concept to concept; there is also a “why.” The why is that we simply cannot continue to be as wasteful as we have been in the last thousands of years building our structures. The time is up. We must be much much more efficient and productive in providing society with buildings and infrastructure.

So, what do you think? Are you willing to keep reading? Perhaps get copies of these two books and start envisioning the future with me? It is a big big deal because the construction industry is galactic in size, desperately needed by society in general and dangerously wasteful and its products, buildings, are one of the top producers of greenhouse gasses. Com’on, comment back to me. Let me know you are out there.