Failure is a Potent Teacher

Failure is a very potent teacher for construction contractors if:

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share
Leadership Tools: Failure is a Potent Teacher.
  • You don’t define failure just as CATASTROPHIC events that seriously damage your business.  
  • You define failure broadly as ANYTHING that is not adding value to the customer or slowing your progress.  
  • You embrace failure as part of the learning process diving deeply into the Root Cause Analysis (RCA). 
  • You develop a culture and systems so that everyone on the team thinks about the business as a series of interrelated cycles.  Consider all the interrelated cycles from the installation of a light fixture in the field to to the monthly project review meetings to the annual business planning process.  
  • Your whole team views each cycle as an opportunity to improve (PDCA)
  • You have developed structured processes for continuously updating your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as your team learns then rolling them out across the company improving the whole team’s capabilities.  

Book Resources:

The Five Elements of Effective Thinking

Thinking in Bets

Related LinkedIn Posts:  

Churchill - Failure is NOT Fatal

Fail 9 Times to Succeed




The Contractor Scoreboard - A Contractor Must Do 3 Things
This outcome-based scoreboard keeps everyone focused on what matters. Avoid metric overload and diffusion of resources. All other metrics throughout all levels of the organization fall into a hierarchy below these with priorities changing over time.
Project Delivery - CM Agency or Multi-Prime
Project Owners can minimize the markups for overhead and profit by contracting directly with the specialty contractors and hiring a Construction Management (CM) firm to work as their agent. This project delivery method is called CM Agency or Multi-Prime.
Cash Flow and the 5Cs of Credit - Overview
Contractors need strong financial partners, including banking, surety, and insurance to grow sustainably. It is important to understand how they evaluate your contracting business.