Pete Kangas is now retired and he has updated his LinkedIn Profile. Pete and I have known each other for over 10 years and we have regularly discussed so many topics over this time.
In 2012 Pete said let me introduce you to the smartest guy at Turner Construction. And I met Chris Heger.
When I met Chris the first thing he did was discuss Industrial Engineering ideas for 10 minutes. Mogensen, Gilbreth, and many other topics. After 10 minutes, it was clear that Chris was not your normal construction person who had the aptitude to change the way construction works. To accelerate the discussions I told Chris that I was an Industrial Engineer and knew well his concepts. For my time studying Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley I do not think I ever heard anyone say get a job in construction. I decided to take my IE degree and go into High Tech and worked at HP in logistics.
What does a guy like me who worked at HP, Apple, and Microsoft who spent no time in the real estate, construction, or facility operations group know about who the smart construction people are. Well, I know lots of smart people from those the companies and how they work. When it comes to construction that was not my expertise, but I got a good introduction to construction working with Olivier Sanche while he was at eBay and Skanska was the construction company. Skanska wanted help and decided to hire me to work with eBay and that was when I got an idea of how construction companies work.
So why do I think Pete and Chris are the smartest guys in construction. I find this quote summarizes it well.
Because when it comes down to it, what I think makes someone smart is their desire to learn more, and their desire to use what they’ve learned to solve problems moving forward.
This is the 1st in a new series of blogging I plan on spending the month on and probably longer.
For those of you know Pete, you can send your congratulations on his LinkedIn Page.
Pete is here in Seattle as well as Chris. We regularly discuss ways to change construction and how to use information technology. And with Pete’s retirement we will continue to have many more discussions on how construction can change by solving some really hard problems.
One example of being smart is the following. The idea of choosing a better way to do things could be explained with the “Fork in the road” metaphor.
A fork in the road is a metaphor, based on a literal expression, for a deciding moment in life or history when choice of presented options is required and once chosen the choice cannot be reversed.
Computerizing the fork in the road does not work, but you could if you choose a smarter way to model the paths possible as a Directed Acyclic Graph. (DAG)
In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG or dag /ˈdæɡ/ (listen)) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called arcs), with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions. DAGs have numerous scientific and computational applications, ranging from biology (evolution, family trees, epidemiology) to sociology (citation networks) to computation (scheduling).
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Sometimes events are not associated with a specific physical time. Provided that pairs of events have a purely causal relationship, that is edges represent causal relations between the events, we will have a directed acyclic graph.[38] For instance, a Bayesian network represents a system of probabilistic events as vertices in a directed acyclic graph, in which the likelihood of an event may be calculated from the likelihoods of its predecessors in the DAG.[39] In this context, the moral graph of a DAG is the undirected graph created by adding an (undirected) edge between all parents of the same vertex (sometimes called marrying), and then replacing all directed edges by undirected edges.[40] Another type of graph with a similar causal structure is an influence diagram, the vertices of which represent either decisions to be made or unknown information, and the edges of which represent causal influences from one vertex to another.[41] In epidemiology, for instance, these diagrams are often used to estimate the expected value of different choices for intervention.[42][43]
There are only a few people who get the idea of a DAG in construction. Two of which are Pete Kangas and Chris Heger. Can you name another?
