Agnes Lan

It is Thursday afternoon. Three bid packages are due Monday, a fourth invitation just landed from a general contractor you have never worked with, and the architect issued a revised drawing set on Tuesday that nobody has compared to the one your estimator already priced. The chief estimator is measuring wall lengths in a PDF viewer while the phone rings with a supplier quote to transcribe. Nothing here is a technology problem yet. It is a capacity problem. Your best estimator spends most of...

Your best field people are filling out forms. That's the most expensive way to do paperwork. At 6:45 a.m. a foreman writes the day's manpower, weather, and deliveries in a hardbound log. At 4:30 p.m. he types most of it again into the project platform, because the office needs it there. At 7:00 p.m. he texts three photos to the superintendent, who forwards two to the PM, who files none. That is construction admin tax: the reporting, re-keying, chasing, and reconstructing crews do before they...

Training moves one person. Reinforcement moves the row. A rep sits through two days of sales training. They come back with a workbook, a few good lines, and a renewed sense of purpose. Three weeks later, the workbook is in a drawer and the calls sound exactly the way they did before. That outcome has almost nothing to do with the quality of the course. It has to do with a mismatch: the training was chosen for its reputation rather than for the specific gap in the team, and nothing in the week...