Episode 4 – Capital Projects in the Energy Industry with T.G. Jayanth

T. G. Jayanth is an independent consultant with over 35 years of experience in capital projects with owners, contractors, and consulting firms. As a consultant, he provides comprehensive support to clients in terms of planning, developing, and executing capital projects and programs.

T. G. Jayanth also helps deliver value across the whole capital project infrastructure—from early development and planning, to engineering, risk management, and portfolio optimisation down to procurement and construction through asset life-cycle management.

As a former Expert – Capital Projects for McKinsey’s Capital Projects, he has helped clients achieve over 20 percent in annual savings on their capital project investments. Aside from being one of McKinsey’s leading experts in digital technology for construction, he is also one of the experts in digital transformation strategies and their implementation for project organisations.

Prior to McKinsey, T.G has helped many organisations in the execution of large industrial projects in the manufacturing, metals, oil and gas, and other industries. He has also held full P&L responsibilities for global engineering organisations and major international projects.

If you want to better understand how large construction projects and companies in the AEC space manage strategic objectives and goals, don’t forget to tune in. T. G. Jayanth not only discussed how capital projects in the energy sector differ from others, he also gave his insight on many interesting topics like the tangible cost of alignment gaps in organisations and where companies fall short in terms of defining goals, among others.

Read the Transcript Here:

Welcome to the Construction Goals Podcast, where industry experts and leaders reveal the good, bad, and ugly about strategic planning. I’m your host, Santosh. We will dive into the who, what, when, and how of goal setting in construction projects. Most importantly, why you should care. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or a budding entrepreneur, you’ll discover something new in each episode about how to manage goals better in the challenging world of architecture, engineering, and construction. Let’s get started.

Santosh: I’m delighted to be speaking with T.G. Jayanth also known as T.G. Most recently T.G. was one of McKinsey’s leading experts on digital technology for construction and on digital transformation strategies and their implementation for project organizations. Prior to McKinsey, T.G. has rich experience of over 35 years as a global project executive with companies such as Honeywell, KBR and SunCoke Energy where he led organizations in the execution of large industrial projects in LNG, oil and gas, metals, manufacturing and other industries. T.G. has held various leadership roles with owner-operator and EPC or engineering procurement and construction companies. His expertise lies in delivering value across the entire capital project life cycle from early planning and development, portfolio optimization, risk management, engineering, procurement and construction all the way through asset life-cycle management. T.G. is also a frequent speaker at conferences such as ENR FutureTech, World of Modular, Fleming’s Annual Conference on Capital Project Performance, etc. on topics such as the future of construction, modular construction, collaborative contracting, digital transformation and much more. T.G., welcome and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

T.G.: Thank you very much, Santosh. Great to be here.

Santosh: I’m particularly interested in understanding how large construction projects in companies in the AEC space manage strategic goals and objectives. What works well, what might be improved and where real value can be added through better management of goals? And so before we start down that path, can you tell me a little bit about how capital projects in the energy sector are different from other areas?

T.G.: So, energy sector broadly speaking covers a lot of ground, right? So everything from oil and gas to probably generation and lately renewables all form part of this broad energy sector that we are talking about and projects have a lot in common across that space but there are also some differences. So, it’s hard to generalize but here are some common features for all these projects. They tend to be large, if you’re thinking of in terms of investments, for instance you’re building and LNG plant you’re talking billions of dollars, LNG (liquefaction plants.) If you’re talking polygeneration, you’re talking of hundreds and millions of dollars. So, to start with these very large bets that are made based on future forecast of what energy costs are going to be and what the demand for energy is going to be, so the risk profile is very significant and those are some of the things that should be on people’s minds when they are planning such projects.

Santosh: Got it. So, with such high stakes, what have you seen in terms of how leaders and such projects approach strategic planning and goal setting so how do they do it, how often is it done, who gets involved, what’s in your experience?

T.G.: There is a whole range of approaches and I’ll make some general observations. There are certainly people who do it well but my observation has been that there is a long way to go in most of the companies that I have had contact with in terms of strategic planning. Both in the approach, how they go about it as well as how they take that strategy that they came up with and actually implement it and execute upon it. I could expand on that a little bit if you like.

Santosh: Yeah, absolutely.

T.G.: So, as I mentioned these are fairly large significant projects that take several years in many cases to be completed. A lot of things changed during that time that a project is being executed. So, if you are an owner company you have this asset that you are investing in that is going to come into operations say 3, 4, 5 years down the road and you are very concerned about the contract that you hire bringing online on time, within the budget that you had estimated for it and the asset performing the way you expected it to perform and meeting the operational goals that you have. If you are the contractor, since we are talking about the construction industry here, you are responsible for meeting that owner’s expectations in terms of cost, schedule, quality, operational performance and so on and so forth. What has happened in the industry overall especially in energy sector over time is that the contractors have had a lot of the risks associated with these large projects pushed onto them and they have not been very successful in managing those risks. We are seeing a large number of construction companies, very well-known ones I mean companies that have been in the business for a long time actually go out of business or get acquired by other companies or have to merge with other companies just in order to survive. There are others who have declared very large losses and it’s become a very shaky business. It never was a very high margin profitable business to start with, but some of the construction companies have been able to do very well in the past because of their experience in technology licenses that they had but over time this competitive advantages have gotten eroded. The risk has increased significantly. The pricing power has not kept up with those risks. So, it’s a very tough situation that they find themselves in. At the same time there are certain macro economic forces that are impacting the industry as well. The industry goes through cycles as you know and during the boom times it needs a lot of people and then it goes through decline, through a low period and a lot of people get laid off and leave the industry and then when things pick up again you cannot in most cases get those people back. If you couple that with the fact that workforce is ageing overall and it’s not a very attractive place for the young professionals coming out of school to join, we are facing something of a problem in terms of manpower resources to staff all the roles that we need staffed. On top of that, we have not been very good at adopting new technologies. It’s always been an attitude of we don’t want to be the first ones to experiment with our technology and that has caused a wait-and-see sort of attitude in planning when it comes to technology and that has not helped at all. These are all some of the factors that have played into the situation that the construction industry finds itself in today.

Santosh: That’s very interesting. So, would you say that with the combination of all these factors, the process of planning has largely remained the same over decades and possibly now there are still fairly archaic ways to approach strategic planning?

T.G.: Yes. I would say so. Again, broadly speaking, there are some people who do it well. The general process that’s followed is to look at past performance, very recent performance. So, if I lost a competitive bid to a competing firm the immediate reaction during the strategic planning process will be I have to somehow reduce my cost so I can be more competitive and win more work or, I did not make any money or actually lost money on this project so I should probably exit this industry and look to enter some other segment of the industry. Those are the kind of factors that seem to drive strategic planning and as you know performance should inform your strategy but not necessarily drive your strategy. There are so many other things that you need to think about especially looking ahead, looking forward to what’s happening in the industry and how you can take advantage of it if you want to be really successful and come up with the strategy that makes you successful in that industry. So, that is typically not very well implemented in the companies that I have had to deal with.

Santosh: That’s fascinating. So, tell me more about that, about performance not driving strategy, how should leaders in this space approach strategy? How should they think about it?

T.G.: Yeah, I think for one thing we have to think of strategy as the product of multiple inputs. Performance is suddenly one input. It tells you the effectiveness of your previous strategy. It’s a score card on how well that strategy worked but it’s not a clear indicator necessarily. The strategy could have been sound, but the execution of the strategy could have been the one that let you down. An analysis of the performance is very important before you take performance into account at all. And even after you do that kind of analysis of why your performance was not up to your expectations it should still be evaluated on the base of how much of that is going to hold true going forward. Things may have changed. There could have been a one off that affected you. It could have been a poor contract. It could have been a supplier who let you down and that may not be something that may happen in the future. There could have been macro economic factors outside your controlled task for example which may have increased the cost of steel that you had to purchase, which may or may not be true going forward. An analysis and drawing up of the performance results from the past is necessary before you take that into account. But what is really important is to look ahead. And I mentioned some of the macro economic factors that affect our industry. What are you going to do about the fact that you may not be able to get experienced, skilled labor for the projects that you’re going to do on the US Gulf Coast if you decide that you’re going to be competing for work on the US Gulf Coast for instance. It’s a fact, it’s a well-known fact that the labor is just not there. It’s very hard to combine. So what are you going to do about it? That should play into your strategy. What markets are growing and showing the most promise for you to consider entering? I mean if you talked a few years ago, maybe the new goals were not even on the horizon, they may not have even entered the discussion. So, if you’re a contractor in the energy industry, should you consider becoming a contractor in the segment of renewables? What experience can you offer for solar for example or wind that you can be successful in that part of the market? And if you do decide to enter that, how are you going to do it? Who is going to lead that effort? Where are the resources going to come from? How are you going to manage it? Who are you going to talk to? It can be very, very helpful and this is one of the flaws that I’ve observed, a lot of the strategic planning of these companies is done almost entirely internally. You bring together your commercial people, you bring together your operational leadership and you sit around in a workshop and discuss it over a week or so and come up with something, come up with the strategic plan. It may be very helpful to bring in some of the other stakeholders in your business. Who are your best customers, your clients and what did they think? How much work do they plan to do that they have you in the mind for, that they may have you in the bidders list for? So if you’re in the real estate business for example and you do residential real estate, should you remain in the residential real estate market? How is it looking in the geography that you plan or should you venture into the commercial real estate industry? What are the factors there that look promising or would stop you from going on there? Who are the big players there? For instance should you enter the healthcare construction? Should you enter the hotel hospitality market? And if you do decide to it, how do you overcome? Then you start taking to these other factors such as the labor shortage and so on and try to come up with a strategy for being successful in those markets.

Santosh: Right. So you know, with all these dimensions internal and external and various stakeholders and your suggesting which is a great suggestion of you know, even enriching the conversation through external inputs, do you feel that organizations have a framework around this that they are using or is it trial and error? How do they approach this the process of strategic planning?

T.G.: Typically, not very well. At least from what I have seen, they do spend a lot of time trying to come up with a plan and as I mentioned there are flaws even in their approach, but they may come up with a plan which is fine as far as it goes. How well is it communicated down to their people and getting alignment through the organization and getting everyone pointed in the right direction and contributing to the success of the strategy, that part is usually very weak. I have worked for engineering construction companies as you mentioned in your introduction for many years, and even at the project manager, project director level, I often did not have a clear idea of what the company strategy was. I knew what I had to do to get to deliver my project, how it fit into the big picture of where the company was going and what the company was trying to do and where the company wanted to be in 5 years it was not at all clear. That is where I think most of the failings are. I think you can almost overcome a fairly weak strategy if you do a fantastic job of implementing and executing on it. But even a top notch strategy is not worth the paper it’s written on unless you can implement it and execute on it. I very often feel that that’s where the industry fails.

Santosh: So, let’s look at that situation more closely where you knew what you had to get done but you had not enough understanding of how it fit into the bigger picture and so there are organizations and environments where there are gaps in alignment and what’s the real impact of that? What’s the actual tangible cost? How does it affect people’s lives?

T.G.: The cost is in the decisions that are made at the project level. So if you don’t arm your project leaders with the knowledge they need on how they should deal with that client, that customer, very often bad decisions could be made in the field. I would give a couple of examples. A project is so dynamic that things are going to change. How you handle those changes is what determines whether the project is successful or not? So for instance, you made discovered that as you start engineering the project and start procurement that there is certain design that could actually reduce the operating cost of the plant and could be very beneficial to the owner in the long run but it would increase the capital cost of the project. Depending on your strategy and how valuable that client/customer is going to be and what the relationship is and how your priorities and your goals have been communicated to you, you may or may not choose to have an open discussion with the owner and provide them the option of choosing the lower net present value options which could be that you do incur a higher capital cost because it’s overall beneficial to the owner in the long run. This happens more often than you can imagine and this is very often the result of the contracting system that we have between owners and contractors. If the contractors held to a fixed price cost for the project they’re going to be very reluctant to bring up even these things, even though the owner may approve a change order to put that in. It could still affect the schedule. It could still be looked at something that took longer or cost more. So, understanding a longer term strategy and how the company wants to build it’s reputation is very critical for people down in the field to execute upon.

Santosh: This is a real scenario that you’ve actually seen happen where such decisions are actually made in absence of, or without knowing that perhaps the top management and the owners were looking at different metrics overtime?

T.G.: Numerous times. Numerous times. Something similar happened many, many times. The short-term benefit tends to override the long-term benefit and there are many, many reasons for this, not just the situation that I described. One of the things that as part of the strategy that our industry should be thinking about is the contracting model that we have somewhat fallen into which is a very confrontational, noncollaborative version of contracting. It served the purpose of owner companies in the short term but it has come to hurt the industry quite a bit over time. In a more collaborative contracting model the kind of situation that I described you would bring such suggestions to the owner immediately and you try to find a way to make the right decision. So when you’re deciding upon strategy, those are the things that you should be thinking about. How hard should you push to change the contracting model with the customers. The owners should be part of the discussion as well not just entering a new market or exiting another market.

Santosh: Right. And let’s look at the flip side of the situation where perhaps you saw a lot of alignment from top levels down to the field and what do you think contributed to that and how did that affect people’s lives?

T.G.: Oh, it’s a night and day difference. The morale of the people in the field it’s just a huge difference. I’ve seen this myself even with my own teams. I was in a project where there was a lot of uncertainty, we were in the early stages, we were still in the feed stage before the project officially kicked off. This was a large LNG project which ultimately cost three billion dollars to do. In the early stages we already had 120 people in my team and because of the uncertainties with the client we would occasionally be given orders to stop, wait and then we proceed. There’s a lot of uncertainties and what was going to happen. The approach that I adopted was that I would hold town halls with my entire team of 120 on at least a bi-weekly basis, every 2 weeks if not more often and keep them all informed about what was happening on the project. And I’m talking about just keeping people informed at the project level and I was told later by some of the people from my team how much they appreciated it even if the news was not always good. Just the fact that they knew what was going to happen was so reassuring for them. And you can imagine that happening at the project level now how much more powerful this can be if you look at this from a company level where the company takes the entire workforce into its confidence and says here’s where we are, here’s where we are going, this is why we are going there, here are the opportunities that it’s going to create for all of us so, if you think you want to play a role in this new strategy put your name in to be part of this new renewables market that we are going to go after. I mean all of a sudden you turn something that a few people are kicking around with perhaps an average probability of success into something that a large part of the company gets behind and invests its energy in, the difference is remarkable.

Santosh: So the solution there of having a town hall a few times in some frequency sounds so simple and is that really all that’s required or is there something because I’m assuming leaders often do that or maybe that’s the wrong assumption, but is there something more structured that will help in organization define and rule out the strategic plan?

T.G.: I think yes. I think the answer is yes. I think you need something more structured when you are talking with strategy. First, you may come up with the strategy and not all parts of the strategy are going to be applicable to everyone within the company. Taking a strategy and then breaking it down by functional area and business unit is extremely important, so then the leaders of those business units and those functional organizations can then say, okay, we understand the overall strategy of the company, these are all the strategic goals that the company is set for itself. What part of that am I going to have the chance to affect? What am I going to be held accountable for? And how am I going to be measured? Those are all the things that flow down from the overall strategy and to do that effectively you can’t just have town halls where you talk to people, you definitely going to need a more structured system that people can take away and look at and play with, put their input into it, so yes the answer to your question is definitely need a more structured system.

Santosh: So if you look across the companies and projects that you’ve been part of and so I give you 4 different dimensions and if you could rate on a scale of 1 to 10 and we will talk about each one a little bit, one being abysmal, nonexistent and 10 being everything is in place, it’s very mature, right? And the four dimensions are–first we will talk about defining your goals then communicating those goals, tracking them to closure and then assimilating learnings about the strategic planning process about your goals and helping inform the next cycle of planning, right?

T.G.: Right.

Santosh: So, let’s start at the beginning, in terms of defining goals, what’s been your experience of the construction projects and companies that you’ve been part of, how would you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 in their capability?

T.G.: I would probably rate them a 4. And by the way I’ll give away a little secret here. That’s probably going to be the highest score I have given.

Santosh: So, where they are falling short? You eluded to some of it but if you would crystalize that why only a 4 out of 10?

T.G.: For a number of reasons. One is for me strategy definition should be a continuous process. Many of the companies that I have had the opportunity to observe do it on an annual cycle. They do it once a year. It’s not a dynamic process. It happens once. With all the flaws that we discussed already and they come up with a strategy and that’s it. It’s a strategy until they revisited the following year. So, if they don’t look at it as an ongoing process because the world around you is constantly changing. The world is not going to be the same a year from now. So, not going to be the same 2 months from now. So unless you revisit your strategy at least, at the very least on a quarterly basis and make some adjustments to it and maybe even add new aspects to it and drop things that are no longer valid, or have proven to be invalid, your strategy is not going to hold together. So, that’s not something that happens. So if you take all those things together, I think 4 is probably generous.

Santosh: Okay. And there’s probably a huge cognitive cost and operational cost as well of making those changes, right?

T.G.: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Definitely, yes. So, it’s one of those things where when you’re looking at a strategy you’re not looking at absolutes, you’re looking at probabilities and you’re looking at alternatives at least of good strategy should have all those aspects into it. You’re not going to say, I am going to get into this new market and capture 10% market share in the first year. You’re going to say, I’m going to enter this market, here are the investments I need to make, here are the resources I’m going to need. I think we have a 75% probability of capturing an 8% market share. It’s all probabilities and there are huge risks associated with it. So you’ll say if these things happen, we have a chance of securing this. So unless you revisit it fairly frequently to uptake those probabilities and also have alternatives available in case that doesn’t work out. What are you going to do? Are you going to increase your spend in acquiring resources or in building up your commercial team or whatever? If the initial signals are that your strategies aren’t effective, you’re gonna spend a whole year before you can react. So, yes, there is a huge cost if you don’t keep following up on your strategy and updating it.

Santosh: Absolutely. So, now let’s go to the second dimension of after defining a strategy of communicating it across levels and across the organization, how would you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 and you already gave us a warning saying that you’re probably gonna go lower, but hopefully you don’t dip into the negatives.

T.G.: No, maybe not negative but it’s fairly getting there. You know, probably a 2. You know, you don’t have to take my word for it. I mean as you walk around our industry, if you ask someone in the field, are you aware of what your company strategy is, your question would answer itself. I would say if you go, say 3 levels below the management team I don’t think there’s gonna be a very coherent view of what the company strategy is.

Santosh: And typically how many levels have you seen in these organizations, these 3 levels, you know, a lot, is it a few, how many levels it could be?

T.G.: There’s a very hierarchical organizations, so yeah, I can’t give you a number, but you know, when I’m talking 3 levels you’re barely getting to the project leadership level.

Santosh: So you’re still at an executive level in your organization?

T.G.: Yup.

Santosh: Oh, interesting. So you know, obviously there is a lot of rigor around project tracking and milestone tracking.

T.G.: Yes.

Santosh: You know, if you look at tracking your strategic goals and objectives to closure how would you rate the organization’s ability to do that?

T.G.: It’s probably somewhere around the 3 because it’s the feedback, the performance evaluation, the metrics used are not the right ones frequently. And what I mean by that is the root cause of why you did not get the 10% market share is quite often not very well understood. Yes, there is a metric. You may set yourself a metric of saying, I want to achieve at least 10% margin on my projects this next year and let’s say that you are tracking that metric and you finish the year at 11% and you’re very happy that you achieved it. That doesn’t mean necessarily that that strategy was successful. It could have been any one of a number of other factors which were even outside of your control which contributed to that success. Understanding where that came from, collecting the data that will allow you to do it and analyzing the data is often not done very well which is the reason for the low score.

Santosh: And do you also see that organizations really fall back to lagging indicators instead of looking at the leading indicators?

T.G.: Absolutely. It’s almost always almost entirely lagging indicators.

Santosh: So then you know, especially where you’re thinking about strategy and the way you put it with assigning probabilities, you really want to be focusing more on leading indicators and measuring those, right?

T.G.: Absolutely. Exactly. So yeah I mean the leading indicators, observing what’s happening out in the world and some of the factors that could cascade down to affect your industry and then you and what your competitors are doing. Looking ahead at those things and coming up with informed estimates and forecast is so critical and very few people do it, or do it well.

Santosh: And what about the lessons learned or assimilating learnings from your previous planning cycles to improve the way you do strategic planning going forward?

T.G.: Yeah, it’s kind of related to the last question because yes it does happen. In fact, if anything it’s a very strong reaction because you are looking at that one metric, or a couple of metrics you react very strongly to them and you say oh the strategy failed so we should exit that market but, a more nuanced understanding of the root causes of that failure, is not there. So, you may say lessons learned exist but it does not do its job. So that would also be a 2 or 3.

Santosh: So you know, pretty low scores in all these different dimensions. The interesting thing is and I guess a question is do leaders really perceive tangible benefits in investing in moving any of these up a few notches or even a couple of notches I mean would there really be benefits to an organization through improving on any of these?

T.G.: I think there are 2 questions there. Would there be a benefit? Absolutely, yes. First of all a construction industry as a whole survives on profit margins in the single digits I mean as you know. I mean high single digits are considered extremely good for this industry. So, if you can get half a percentage point, that’s huge. I mean half a percentage point improvement is really pretty good. So if you go from 6% average margin to 6.5% you should be celebrating. So there is a huge benefit to it. Now, do the leaders see the connection between that kind of improvement and strategic planning? I’d have to say not everyone does. They see much more tactical improvements being needed. So for instance let’s say, my god, we did not do change on management very well. My god, we didn’t do schedule management well. So, those are tactical and those are extremely important because they could inform on your strategy because you may say, hey you know, all those resources I had, experienced resources I had to do my scheduling are gone and we haven’t been back filling that so you need to take a strategic initiative here to really build up our scheduling capability. That will be a strategic initiative that comes out of this realization of a tactical problem. That connection is not always made. There’s more of a reaction to the tactical issue.

Santosh: And them I’m guessing that, if you were to go to one more layer of abstraction and ask them as an organization, as a team, as a culture, how effectively are you thinking through and planning out strategic objectives, I think you would get even more of a blank stare, right?

T.G.: Yeah. I mean there’s almost sort of a cultural aversion if you would because we are construction companies. We are guys who could do real work in the field. All the strategy stuff is for the McKinsey’s of the world, the MBAs. That’s not part of a business. We know our business. We know what to do sort of thing.

Santosh: So you eluded to some changes but especially now you have had so many years of positive growth but what’s happening in the industry to perhaps make leaders sit up and take more attention of how they approach strategic planning and how they consciously try to change the way that they do these things?

T.G.: Oh yeah, I mean I don’t think they have a choice now. They are definitely waking up to the reality of what the industries facing. As I mentioned the red flags have been going up. When you see these companies that have been in business for so long and were considered leaders suddenly post loses of 200 million dollars in their quarterly reports and a few months later say that they are putting themselves up for sale or actually get acquired or even announce that they’re exiting certain businesses because they don’t feel that they can continue to provide services in those area. These are all real examples. I can give you names of companies in our industry who have probably done those things. So leaders, the shareholders and the board of governors are calling upon the leaders and say what is going on here? Isn’t it time that you guys came up with strategies to guide your companies through these kind of changes? We cannot continue to keep telling our shareholders to be patient. We have to fix this problems.

Santosh: So there is clearly an opportunity, there is pressure on organizations and on leaders to do things differently. There is also so much of wisdom out there. There’s tons of goal setting in strategy and frameworks yet not enough adoption or awareness, in some cases may not be even of interest in this field. What do you think infrastructure leaders and project managers really need in order to make this within grasp for them to actively implement a mature goal setting framework in their teams?

T.G.: I think what I would propose has to be simple to start with. As I’ve said, culturally these are not industries that are used to doing this. So, just to get them to come together and start talking about this is a big first step and if you start getting too sophisticated, walking in with a 50-slide PowerPoint deck to show them what strategy setting is all about, we’re gonna lose them within 10 minutes.

Santosh: Right.

T.G.: So I think the approach has to be fairly simple, something like the OKR thing from the technology industry, you know, Google and others have been in something. I’m not saying necessarily that that is the solution. Something that’s easily understandable that has worked for companies that they can potentially identify with. So, if you’re going to a construction company and say Google uses this you’re gonna lose some again because they are not in common Google. However, if you can show an example of a company that’s somewhat in the same kind of business that they are, like a service provider and say that company uses it you may get their attention and then show the connection between what they have to do, how much effort, ,how much time would it take and what’s involve in getting it communicated and disseminated to their workforce and the potential benefit of it. If you can somehow show that it does not necessarily involve hiring a whole new organization to develop and implement strategy that will help as well because very often people think that these are all, you know, moves to build a kingdom by someone, right? So I think reassuring them that that’s not necessarily the case that this actually involves people within the company doing this, contributing to it I think those are all things that we have to keep in mind. It should become part of the way they do their work, part of the way that they run their business and not a complete additional exercise that they have to take on.

Santosh: Right. So, lastly what advice would you have for leaders, executives and project managers in this industry?

T.G.: My advice would be learn from other industries. I mean there is no lack of good examples of what’s going on out there. Number two would be use the resources that are available out there. Whether they are consultants or whether they are companies that provide this kind of service, use them. The positive impact that you can get out of going through a really effective strategy definition and implementation process far, far outweighs anything you may spend on bringing in some people and having them help you go through the process so, definitely give it a shot. I mean you have very little to lose and a whole lot to gain. In fact, you’re very survival could be at stake. So, there’s a lot at stake.

Santosh: That’s definitely pressing advice and great advice. So much shared, T.G. Thank you so much for everything that you shared today.

T.G.: Thank you also, Santosh. I enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Construction Goals Podcast. I’d love to hear about your experience with goals and strategic planning, or answering questions you may have after listening to the show. You can e-mail me at santosh@goalcheck.in, or visit www.GoalCheck.in to submit any feedback or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for listening!

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Construction Goals Podcast. I’d love to hear about your experience with goals and strategic planning, or answering questions you may have after listening to the show. You can e-mail me at santosh@goalcheck.in, or visit www.GoalCheck.in to submit any feedback or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.

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