problems, with the fewest solutions, are found. Burberry didn’t abandon the traditional store model and go exclusively digital. Instead, it embraced an omni-channel model at the edge of disruption. It harnessed the emerging digital disruption, merged it with its existing business model, and moved confidently into the future armed with the solutions and business models required to thrive in the new world.
The edge of disruption for your organization is that point from which you can see both past and present changes in technology, regulation, customer demand, cost structures, employees, investors, and other variables converging into a larger wave of disruption that threatens the relevance of your existing value proposition and business model. As you project these changes into the future, you can see the erosion that turns your products or services into a commodity business, where you can only compete on price, volume, and a reduced cost structure, all the while burning your people out by asking them to do more with less.
Instead of erosion, you can also see a different future at the edge of disruption—where multiple new challenges for your customers emerge in the complexity that the disruption brings, and therefore where opportunities exist for you to create more value. It is at this intersection of old and new that the chance to differentiate yourself is found. In this book, we will help you define where your edge of disruption is and show you what to do when you get there to become the obvious choice.
So you now know where you want to go—to the edge of disruption, where you can synthesize existing and emerging business models and create more value. And you want to do more than just go there—you want to solve the problems that you find there and exploit the opportunities that arise. You want to use the vantage point of the edge to challenge assumptions and beliefs effectively. You want to create new and differentiated ways of doing business—with products and services that meaningfully change how business gets done.
To do that means figuring out how to get to the edge and stay there, continuously learning and moving as the edge moves. The sneaky little truth about the edge of disruption is this: It doesn’t stay in the same place for too long. You have to learn to perpetually move with it. When you can do that, you will remain the obvious choice for your customers, employees, investors, and communities, year after year—you will be a company that matters to all of the people you serve.
HOW DO YOU BUILD THE CAPABILITY TO DELIVER MORE VALUE, YEAR AFTER YEAR?
When Doug Woods, Peter Nosler, and Ron Davidowski (the D, P, and R of DPR) founded their company in 1990, they knew they wanted it to matter in the construction industry. They wanted to be a force for positive change on multiple fronts.
• First, DPR wanted to change the way clients engaged with their general contractors (GCs). Traditionally, clients and GCs have had notoriously poor relationships, plagued by missed expectations, litigation, and substandard outcomes. DPR wanted to engage with clients in a way that improved the quality of their clients’ experience while also improving on-time and on-budget project delivery.
• Second, DPR wanted to change the way it engaged both its staff and its contractors. In the “Vivid Description” outlined in its core ideology, DPR sets an ambitious goal that “over the next 30 years our people practices will be recognized as being as progressive and influential as Hewlett Packard’s were over the last 50 years.”3
• Finally, DPR wanted to change the communities it served, by building great things with great business partners.
Consider that DPR has grown from a startup in the 1990s to a $3 billion success story, and has become the obvious choice for companies like Facebook and Genentech looking to partner with a GC to “build great things.” At the same time, it has been included on multiple “Best Companies to Work For” lists (including for Millennials),4 and has given millions of dollars to charity through its DPR Foundation. We think it is fair to say that DPR matters—to its clients, its employees and contractors, and its communities.
How does it manage to do this, not once, but year over year? By consistently identifying the best opportunities to solve more complex problems and then doing the hard work required to solve them. In DPR’s case, the leadership team members readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect, but they lean into the complexity of the most technical construction projects and they dedicate themselves to leading the industry in its understanding of innovative new approaches, redefining best practice as they go, with a commitment to delivering more valued outcomes to their clients.
DPR’s leadership team does something that we consistently saw in the companies we studied. To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions. Companies that matter don’t just talk about opportunities to create more value; they do the hard work required to actually convert those opportunities to demonstrate value. When complex problems emerge at the edge of disruption—where the future meets the past—these companies don’t shy away from the challenge, trying to protect a legacy business model. They are willing to take risks to develop and refine a new way forward. And they don’t do it just for themselves.
Companies that matter talk incessantly about legacy and doing the right thing. They are committed to creating value for their clients and for their industry and communities as well. They see it as their role to ensure that everyone—even their competitors— and the community are better today than they were yesterday. Companies that leave their customers, employees, and communities better off by delivering the most valued solutions have an elevated impact.
DPR has an elevated impact because its leaders chose to work differently with their clients, their contractors, and their communities. The founders wanted to challenge how its business worked at the most basic level—the contracting relationship between the buyer of a building and its builder. They had been in the industry long enough to see all the problems with the existing litigious model, and decided to change the game by elevating their impact and redefining the contracting process.
To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions.
That couldn’t happen in isolation. DPR had to have great relationships with people of influence within the right client organizations who had the vision and ability to build great buildings. It had to vest its financial interests with the success of the project, putting more skin in the game and helping to pioneer new ways to partner. And it had to connect well beyond the client, to bring bankers, employees, subcontractors, and even universities along on the journey. When DPR’s founders stood back and looked at the impact they were trying to have, they saw that they needed to influence the entire industry and market, so they built the broad relationships required to do just that.
They needed to have elevated relationships—relationships that gave them influence with people who had the ability to make decisions, partnerships to provide the deep knowledge of the nuances and cultural realities inside their client organizations, and connections to people and ideas required to create solutions to one of the most complex problems in their industry: the contracting relationship itself.
Companies that matter elevate relationships with their customers and throughout their industry. They are the go-to companies when an industry voice is needed, and they have the ability to pull together market-wide conversations to focus on innovation and collaboration. At the same time, companies that matter can support intimate and nuanced discussions with their clients about the client’s strategies, challenges, and future. In other words, through their relationships, they influence, partner, and connect better than anyone else in the industry. Their relationships are part of what enables them to have an elevated impact.
DPR’s edge of disruption these days is its adoption of Integrated Project Delivery and risk-sharing models that are redrawing the lines between client,
