known for its rough-and-tumble, almost cutthroat contracting processes. In the thick of deeply rooted industry assumptions about contractors, the bidding process, and how work gets done, DPR has managed to challenge everything.
DPR is a $3 billion technical construction company that was founded in 1990. For five years in a row starting in 2010, DPR ranked on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, landing in the top ten in 2014. The Huffington Post included DPR in its list of “10 Companies College Students Should Want to Work For,” alongside companies like Google and Zappos.4 Even more astonishing, as of 2015, DPR received more than 80 percent of its business from referrals. DPR was so clearly the obvious choice for certain clients that 25 percent of them (and in some years as many as one-third) engaged DPR to deliver multimillion-dollar projects without undergoing competitive bidding. That’s definitely not the norm in DPR’s industry.
To truly appreciate DPR’s accomplishment, you need to understand a little more about the construction industry’s bidding process. Like many industries that run on competitive bidding, construction has over the years become a game where some contractors bid low to win the work and anticipate making up money in change orders later on—a game that is avidly supported by some customers who pit contractors against each other to drive down price, without regard for the actual cost of the program. The bidding process has become a deeply held assumption in the industry, making DPR’s “no-bid” awards in a highly commoditized industry unusual and impressive. Pushing back on clients’ procurement-oriented process, the company built strong, enduring, strategic partnerships to benefit clients and deliver better project outcomes.
This was one of DPR’s most valuable moves to its edge of disruption. It set out to fundamentally redefine the way GCs and clients partnered to build great things. DPR was on a one-way mission to break the traditionally adversarial nature of the industry in which the three cofounders had spent their lives, and it wanted to create a company that did it better than anyone else. For DPR, this edge consisted of three key elements. First, it specifically focuses on technical construction in partnership with customers. DPR set out from its very inception to live at the edge of building construction and strived to seek and accept only work that was technical and complex in nature. Second, it is determined to be “ever forward.” If a new and better way to do something emerges on the fringe of the industry, DPR embraces it. It believes in continual self-initiated change, improvement, learning, and advancement of standards for their own sake. For example, DPR is constantly taking new technology such as building information modeling from the edge of disruption and creating better outcomes for its clients in the process. And finally, DPR very purposefully encourages different models for contracting. The traditional bidding and contracting process itself was at times in conflict with building partnerships, and was a causal factor in the adversarial nature of the business. DPR refused to comply with the status quo and, with every opportunity over the years, continued to guide its clients, and increasingly the industry, in a more collaborative direction.
How did DPR pull that off? It’s not because DPR is the only general contractor in its space (it’s not) or because DPR has some proprietary way to build (it doesn’t). And it isn’t because Doug Woods, DPR cofounder, is a nice guy who is completely committed to his company (although he is). It’s because DPR has spent time and energy making sure it is very clear about the type of clients it wants to work with (more on this in Chapter 4), and is always looking out to the future for ways to matter more. We’re going to talk more about its approach to customers in Section Two, “Elevated Relationships.” For now, though, let’s consider how DPR knows what it knows, and how it uses that to challenge its assumptions about how work gets done.
DPR purposefully and methodically captures knowledge inside and outside the organization for subsequent use. It includes everyone in its collection process, even its customers and subcontractors. Its ongoing push to learn keeps the company continually on the edge of disruption in its industry when it comes to customer satisfaction, and it supports DPR’s unique approach to project delivery and its overall business. How? Because it always works to understand what works and what doesn’t, and that stops it from making assumptions about how work gets done. At the same time, its processes are visible to its customers, giving buyers the confidence to know that DPR is using the most relevant processes and techniques to build great buildings.
You can’t learn from your expertise if you don’t know what it is or where it exists inside your organization.
Think about it for a minute. You can’t learn from your expertise if you don’t know what it is or where it exists inside your organization. DPR is obsessed with cataloging and registering everything it knows. An obvious way DPR catalogs knowledge is simply by doing more than most companies do to solicit client impressions and perceptions. When we visited DPR’s office in Redwood City, California, to interview senior leaders, everyone we met seemed to be either coming out of a feedback session or heading into one. One executive was conducting a customer satisfaction survey with his client on a recent project. When he asked the client to rate its project compared to previous experiences, the client said that DPR was not only the best GC experience he had ever had, but the best customer service experience, period. Not something you’d expect to hear about a construction company.
Customer feedback sessions are only one of a number of techniques DPR deploys. Another technique, called craft sessions, enables DPR to gather knowledge from employees and subcontractors on an ongoing basis. “Craft” is the specific building trade engaged to help build projects. To ensure that DPR employees and subcontractors are constantly improving, the company facilitates regular structured conversations to share best practices. In one session, for instance, a tradesman shared how he had discovered a new and faster way to estimate and install drywall, shaving 10 percent off the scheduled time while reducing waste. Another clued the group in to a newly discovered green product that had performed even better than less environmentally friendly products. At DPR, managers facilitate these calls in a structured way that verges on scientific, expecting participants to contribute and learn. Because of the formal nature of this collaborative learning, we might best think of these calls not just as standard meetings but as true “learning labs.”
DPR also gathers knowledge internally through its Global Learning Group, charged with formal learning and development. As Cari Williams, DPR’s head of people practices, told us, “Who we build is as important as what we build.”5 Rather than simply buying content and hiring trainers from outside the company, DPR challenges its people to develop their own content by taking stock of what they already know.
DPR didn’t overlook the job site as a place for capturing knowledge. It launched Opportunity-For-Improvement (OFI) programs and charged every job site with seeking out either best practices or new ideas for improving everything from record keeping to tool use; employees recorded their insights on the OFI cards. Although the cards themselves hardly broke new ground, the intensity with which DPR deployed them did. The company eagerly took action in response to OFI suggestions, showing near-religious discipline in sharing the best of them across the company. Then in 2009, recognizing the difficulties that an organization of DPR’s size has in scaling ideas, DPR created an Innovation Support Team whose sole responsibility was to take OFI-style cards and spread the insights they contained. The Management Committee appointed Jim Washburn, DPR employee number nine, to head up the Innovation Support Team, and allocated it significant financial and human resources, including implementing software to capture and track ideas from the OFI suggestions and other sources.
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