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xv Preface This is a book about the restoration of the master builder to the commercial building site. As a sponsored project, it is written as the story of one firm, but one that delivered large commercial projects in ways that have helped to redefine the role of the general contractor. Charles J. Pankow—Charlie, to those who knew and worked with him— believed that the construction of customized commercial buildings would benefit from the participation of the contractor in their planning and design with the owner, architect, structural engineer, and other members of the building team. He was confident that combining this approach to project management—later popularized as design-build—with mass production techniques in concrete that had been deployed in the construction of factories and warehouses since the early 1900s would allow him to guarantee the delivery of high-quality buildings on time and under budget. In 1963 he bet his career on it. With most of the men who worked for him in the building division that he had established in the Los Angeles District of Peter Kiewit Sons’, he started Charles Pankow, Inc. (CPI). Pankow was not the first contractor to deploy design-build to satisfy the needs of building owners, but he pioneered its use in the commercial sector during the second half of the twentieth century . And while the techniques that he deployed had been used in industrial settings, his project teams—working within a company culture that valued accountability, curiosity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness—adapted, improved, and “tweaked” them in the manner of the craftsmen who propelled Britain to technological leadership during the Industrial Revolution.1 Over the next four decades, the Pankow companies completed as many as 1,000 projects. More than 160 of them involved the construction or expansion of large structures: office buildings, department stores, hospitals, hotels, multi-unitresidentialcomplexes,parking garages, publicbuildings, and shopping centers (see appendices A and B). Many of these structures would not PREFACE xvi have been built were it not for the participation of Pankow as contractor in a design-build setting. At the time of Charlie Pankow’s death, in January 2004, the company employed more than 200 people and was handling between $300 and $450 million in outstanding contract volume.2 Five years earlier, Engineering News-Record had recognized Pankow among 125 individuals for their contributions to the construction industry during the 125-year history of the trade publication.3 In 2004 the design-build niche that CPI initially had occupied virtually alone now accounted for nearly one-third of the market for nonresidential construction.4 Diffusion of the methodology was slow. CPI had yet to grow into a large firm by the time Pankow reorganized it twice in the mid-1980s. Moreover,CharlesPankowlargelyconfineditsoperationstotheprivatesector; public sector procurement requirements were a major obstacle to the spread ofthepractice.Throughleadershippositionsinengineeringsocieties,publication of journal articles and textbook chapters, and other means, Charlie Pankow and his colleagues promoted design-build. These efforts were prologue to the founding of the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) in 1993. This biography of the Pankow companies heeds the call of the editors of Business History Review to investigate “important and contentious subjects where intellectual breakthroughs are possible.”5 The empirical observations of a single firm, of course, would seem to offer little opportunity to draw robust conclusions about an entire industry, much less erect new frameworks for understanding business history. As detailed narrative history, however, the book pays particular attention to entrepreneurship and innovation—two of the areas that the editors suggest hold promise for scholars. It reconstructs the stages in the life of the firm, from its incubation within Peter Kiewit Sons’ to its growth into a middle-sized firm with the capacity to take on projects normally associated with much larger contractors. It also describes innovation at the project level, which should interest civil engineers, and establishes a close link between these achievements and the overall success of the firm, which should interest students of business. Underlying both entrepreneurship and innovation was the company’s culture, referred to internally as the Pankow Way: a client-service-oriented approach to doing business that suffused decision making throughout the company. From its roots in the Kiewit building division, the Pankow firm had more in common with the so-called Great Groups described by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, than the hierarchical organizations that have received the largest share of at- [18.216.233.58] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 23:49...

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