Today’s AEC market leaders are adept at discussing design and building strategies. Tomorrow’s leaders will be just as comfortable discussing their client’s business strategies. Owners spend enormous energy developing marketing strategies, production strategies, capital management strategies, and human resource strategies, and they will expect AEC experts to explain to them how the built environment can be used as an asset in executing these identified goals.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between knowing the owner’s business strategies and competitiveness.

In the next 10 years, differentiation will be hard to achieve within the boundaries of any individual discipline. Project delivery systems are broken and everyone knows it. Our buildings take too long to design and build, cost too much, and have difficulty responding to the ever-changing business demands of the owners. Desperately needed improvements simply can’t be achieved by any one of the individual disciplines involved. As horrible as it sounds, we’re actually going to have to talk to each other. The next generation of leaders will exploit the power of interdisciplinary collaboration.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between new alliances and competitiveness.

The marketplace is constantly churning, with new ideas bubbling forth, old ones dissipating, some rules evolving, some rules imploding. Ours is a game of continuous adjustment. Conventional wisdom tells us that smaller firms are more nimble and larger companies have great difficulty trying to spin in a new direction when the marketplace demands it. We found no such phenomenon. Operational agility, it seems, is as much an attitude as it is an organizational construct. We uncovered very large, agile firms and plenty of small ones held captive by their own hide-bound traditions.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between operational agility and competitiveness.

Within many companies, the responsibility for tracking the competition, looking for new opportunities, and nurturing a competitive advantage is assigned to a relatively small group. Often that group is the marketing and sales people. The new market leading companies won’t work that way. Everyone in the venture must be cognizant of the competitive landscape and will be rewarded for the constant mining of new opportunities.

There will be certain projects for which your company is considered a “favorite”, and others for which your company would be considered a “long shot”. Market leaders invest energy into the art and science of creating “breakthroughs”, winning projects for which they are not the most qualified competitor. Tomorrow’s market leaders will develop the capacity to walk into a room filled with superior competitors and walk out with the project. Companies who can’t pull this off will be destined to an eternity of similar projects from similar buyers with bland margins.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between marketing breakthroughs and competitiveness.

Self-congratulatory ventures don’t long survive. The most competitive companies seem to operate within a culture of obsessive improvement, and they require as much from employees at every level. This is the kind of thing that’s fun to talk about, so that’s what most companies do. Few, however, are actually willing to pay the price. For those who do, the rewards can be substantial. We found that the most successful ventures institutionalize the process.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between obsessive improvement and competitiveness.

Normal, well-adjusted people often make pleasant dinner companions but seldom consistently outperform the competition. New market leaders will purposefully identify, acquire, and manage high-impact people who are worth more than their pay. This kind of thing is harder to do than it sounds, but it is an invaluable component in achieving breakthroughs and outperforming the market.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between high-impact people and competitiveness.

Branding is a phenomenon that has been studied by the business community for many years. Even though its value has been clearly established, few companies in the AEC community effectively exploit its power. We found several examples of companies that do it intuitively, but tomorrow’s leaders will execute a specific branding strategy.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between branding and competitiveness.

We are particularly interested in comments regarding the relationship between customer intimacy and competitiveness.

We found that most companies have only a very intuitive and inadequate view of the competitive landscape. Not surprisingly, the next generation of successful competitors will have more accurate information about the specific rules of engagement.