“This industry hasn’t changed the way it does business a whole lot in the last hundred years,” says Woods, sitting in the Patsy Cline conference room at company headquarters. (DPR headquarters, which exudes the slick feel of its Silicon Valley neighbors, is filled with rooms named after pop-culture notables.) “From the very beginning, we wanted to be quantifiably different and better. We wanted to be a truly great construction company.”
Indeed, back in 1990, before Woods and his cofounders, Peter Nosler and Ron Davidowski (the “P” and “R” in DPR), hammered their first nail, they hammered out a “core ideology” designed to set them apart from their peers—and to announce their intention to challenge convention in their industry. “We exist to build great things,” the ideology declares. “We must be different from and more progressive than all other construction companies. We stand for something.”*
What DPR stands for is an approach to the business that takes on and remedies some of the most notorious pitfalls of construction, the designed-in headaches that give the industry such a bad name: unreliable price estimates, endless cost overruns, delays and slipped schedules, completed projects with a never-ending list of fixes, and lawsuits and recriminations between builders and clients. Woods and his colleagues have been unblinking in their critique of what’s gone wrong with the industry to which they have devoted their professional lives. They have also made it clear that they would not look to the powers-that-be in their industry for ideas or inspiration about how to fix what ailed the business. “We’ve tried to emulate some of the high-tech companies and what propelled them,” Woods says. “Silicon Valley has been a proving ground for people who created new ways of doing business. That’s what we wanted to do in construction.”4
Little wonder, then, that DPR, by virtue of its technology-inspired approach to the business, has become the contractor of choice for many of the country’s technology darlings. For example, it built Pixar Animation Studio’s lavish headquarters, the dream factory where Steve Jobs and his colleagues turn out blockbusters like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. It has built big corporate campuses for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. It has built vast computer-chip factories across the country. And it has become a leading force in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, building offices, laboratories, and state-ofthe-art manufacturing complexes. These are all buildings that require fierce attention to detail, have huge budgets, and allow no margin for error. For Charles Schwab, DPR built a mission-critical data center inside an existing building while stock-trading operations continued on the floor above. For Motorola, it built a state-ofthe-art semiconductor plant in Austin, Texas, without interrupting operations at the other ultrasensitive chip lines that surrounded the new factory. For Pixar, it transformed the site of a run-down Del Monte cannery into an exquisitely stylish filmmaking complex that is downright breathtaking in its blend of high-tech wizardry and quirky personality. (We’ll visit the Pixar complex for other reasons in chapter 11.)
DPR didn’t just build its business (and these buildings) in accordance with its aim-high ideology. The founders also established “tangible images” and “vivid descriptions” of the future—rich, easy-to-visualize portraits of what success would look like if the company lived up to its ideology. Early on, success meant being recognized as a different kind of company, a change-minded maverick in a slow-moving industry. “Our families will say we work for a great company,” reads one of the company’s first 12 descriptions. “Our friends back East will mention that they have heard about DPR’s greatness,” says another.
As DPR grew and prospered, its strategy and ideology remained constant, but its definitions of success grew decidedly more ambitious. “Over the next 30 years,” reads one of its more recent “vivid descriptions” of the future, “our people practices will be recognized as being as progressive and influential as Hewlett-Packard’s were over the last 50 years.” Reads another, “When it comes to quality and innovation, we will do for the construction industry what Toyota did for the auto industry.” And another: “Like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, our people and company will be known for being aggressive and ‘bullet smart.’”
A construction company that aims to be thought of in the same breath as Toyota, Microsoft, and some of the legends of Silicon Valley? This is hardly conventional language in a business whose stereotype image includes the salty language of its employees—and that’s the point. “I’ve never wanted to be like everybody else,” says Woods. “I don’t want DPR to be like everybody else. We wanted to create a new culture, a new way of doing business in this industry.”
Like Roy Spence’s ad agency, DPR is a company that believes firmly in the power of language and symbols. Painted on the walls of its offices in Redwood City are the slogans and rallying cries that get repeated at all the company’s offices around the country. “We exist to build great things,” one wall declares. “Smarter, faster, better, safer,” exclaims another. “Exceed all expectations,” urges a third.
This strategic vocabulary is about more than just talk. One of the company’s core values is “ever forward”—basically, a commitment to keep pushing to get better, whether or not the marketplace demands it. “We believe in continual self-initiated change, improvement, learning, and the advancement of standards for their own sake.” To help translate that core value into an operating reality, the company named two “Ever Forward Champions”—staffers whose job is to measure DPR’s performance along its target goals, to share those results widely, and to keep developing new ways to improve the scores. The Ever Forward Champions play a key role in DPR’s “Global Learning Group,” an ambitious training program that steeps all 2,400 employees in both technical skills—budgeting, planning and scheduling, project management—and the fine points of DPR’s culture. Each employee is expected to spend at least 80 hours per year in these courses—again, not exactly standard operating procedure at most construction companies.
It’s hard to overstate just how richly descriptive DPR is about virtually all aspects of its business and day-today work practices. It seems to have invented a piece of vocabulary to describe every nook and cranny of its strategy and future. DPR’s latest future-defining exercise is Mission 2030—a vivid picture of what the company will look like in 25 years—and a clear set of benchmarks along the way, defined as Base Camp 2010. (DPR will establish other interim Camps on the path to 2030.) One of the most ambitious goals: to increase each year the percentage of business DPR lands “without competition”—that is, clients who consider no other company to build their project. At present, that percentage stands at 33 percent of DPR’s business, a striking figure in an industry where competitive bids are as routine as coffee breaks.
Why invest so much energy in building a vocabulary as opposed to just, say, building factories and laboratories for clients? “Because at the heart of every great company is a clear sense of purpose,” answers Peter Salvati, a senior DPR executive who works out of the company’s San Diego office and has played a lead role in Mission 2030. “One of the things I always have fun with—and I’ve probably done this with a hundred clients—is to suggest that they ask other construction companies, ‘Why does your company exist?’ You ought to be able to answer that about your own company. But so many people just look at one another, shrug their shoulders, and say, ‘To make money, I guess.’ It’s different for us.”
Being different has made all the difference at DPR. There’s no question that the company has prospered by unleashing a disruptive business strategy in its industry. But the ultimate gauge of its performance, says Doug Woods, is how much influence it has on the rest of the industry. It all goes back to strategy as advocacy. Indeed, another goal for Base Camp 2010 is for DPR’s internal scorecard—detailed metrics about schedules, budgets, change orders, and the like—to become a generally accepted benchmark for the construction business as a whole.