Monthly Archives: November 2012

Reputations accumulate through consistent excellence in each interaction, each conversation, each deliverable. The Atlas GT holiday card design makes an excellent example. Cosmic Design (http://designbycosmic.com/) accepted the small, marginally interesting assignment even though their plate was full and Thanksgiving weekend was imminent.

Along with an artwork proof, which I expected, Eric included this carefully composed photo of the mockup.  Take a minute to look that the photo:  it’s well composed, has interesting focal depth, and the color has been modified to accentuate the theme . Work went into this photo, care and attention to detail not normally warranted by an interim proof. And yet it gives the impression of effortless cool. Cosmic, again, exceeded my expectations, increased my enthusiasm for the project, and cemented another building block onto their already significant reputation.

It’s hard to focus on fine details when we’re pressed for time. Yet the value of such attention to detail is much higher than the few minutes saved by cutting corners.  I’m hopeful that we can learn from Cosmic’s example that reputations for excellence are built in small, incremental, but ultimately very valuable steps.

Our friend Julio, back in 1998 or so, stated our business objective so concisely that we’ve adopted it as the unofficial motto of Atlas Geotechnical:

“Just don’t suck”

It seems like many of our peers, learned engineers of great experience, often don’t seem to understand the whole “efficiency and reliability” point of foundation engineering, sometimes so severely that their product could be fairly described as “sucking.”  Clearly, confirmation bias causes us to notice the failures while the triumphs pass by unobserved.  It seemed to us at the time, and has been bourne out over the past decade, that all we needed to do to assure success was just to not suck. And so an inside joke was born: “just don’t suck.”

A fascinating examination of that strategy appears in David Kadavy’s blog this week:  http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/permission-to-suck/

I’d encourage you all to read it though and consider the implications to critical infrastructure design.

Clearly, it’s not acceptable to suck at designing hospital foundations or tunnel linings. On the other hand, professional growth is imperative so that our generation is prepared assume the mantle of industry leadership being passed on as an older generation, the Alyeska Pipeline and Nuclear Power Plant generation, retires from active consulting. I think the message here, a very valuable message, is that it’s acceptable, and even necessary, to suck at new work provided you secure senior review capable of correcting your shortcoming and literally turning your first-attempt sows ear into the silk purse that your customers are entitled to expect.

So give yourself permission to suck as a necessary aspect of professional growth. And then acknowledge that your initial attempts at anything new are likely to suck, back yourself up with senior review, and make sure that your finished product doesn’t suck no matter how feeble your own initial efforts may have been.

Our friends at Orion Marine Group won a fun little project improving the old Weyerhaeuser waterfront facility for the Port of Everett. The project includes rebuilding the tops of the two existing dolphins and adding a third dolphin close to the wharf.  The photo below (from the Port of Everett website) shows the site, with the two dolphins visible between the two ships that are berthed parallel to shore.

Atlas’ role is pretty minor, just running wave equation analyses, but there’s some really great aspects to the work that I find really satisfying:

  1. The existing dolphins had excellent pile monitoring back in 1994 (by Gary Henderson’s crew at GeoEngineers Tacoma) and so we know a lot about how the new piles are going to drive. I was able to calibrate the new WEAP model to the old driving records before switching hammers and pile types for the predictive runs.
  2. It’s always a treat to work in new terrain.  I have a rudimentary understanding of marine stratigraphy in Puget Sound, but I would not have guessed that the soils are as deep and as soft as I see on the logs.  So I leave the project just a little bit smarter than I started it.
  3. The guys at Orion are always coming up with innovative ideas, and Atlas does our best work for innovative contractors. They have an idea for avoiding a tide-related schedule impact that I’m not sure any other contractor would have suggested, and it’s requiring a very innovative analysis to confirm that it’s feasible.  There’s real money on the line too, which makes the work more engaging.

We’ll wrap up our computations over this weekend and then, if all goes as expected, propose a change to the dolphin modification drawings that could be really beneficial to the Owner and Contractor both. Smart and diligent contractors should always be successful, and it’s a real pleasure to be a part of Orion Marine’s continuing growth.