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 I was reading an interesting book titled The Monster Under the Bed (How Business Is Mastering the Opportunity for Knowledge for Profit) by Stan Davis and Jim Botkin (Simon & Schuster, 1994) when I came across something that made me sit up straight and stare out the window for a while.The authors were citing a report titled "Work-Based Learning: Training America's Workers" (Washington, D.C.: GPO, U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training, Employment and Training Administration, 1989). This is what it said: "The occupational half-life, that is, the span of time it takes for one-half of workers' skills to become obsolete - has declined from seven-to-fourteen years to three-to-five years, according to the National Research Council. This is particularly true in engineering. In their first five years working, half of what engineering students learned in college becomes obsolete. Ten years out, less than a quarter of that material is still applicable. In fact, corporate educators have discovered that a real challenge is how to unlearn much of this useless information. One week of training per year is more than most engineers and professionals get. Yet this is not nearly enough just to keep up. This is why a common belief among education-oriented executives is that learning faster and better may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." So how do you keep up? Here are some thoughts I've gathered from watching and listening to some of the brightest and most successful people I know.
I remember working with an engineer (unfortunately, after the fact) who had specified steam traps for some of the two-pipe radiators in an 80-year-old Manhattan office building. The radiators had 1-1/2" supplies and 1-1/4" returns, which was strange. None of the radiators had steam traps, which was even more strange. The engineer added the traps to his new radiators because he thought all two-pipe radiators needed them. What he didn't realize was that he was dealing with a turn-of-the-century oddball called the Two-Pipe Air Vent System. This old beast was supposed to have steam in both the supply and the return lines. When the contractor installed the traps, every radiator in the vicinity stopped heating and started banging. If you're going to work in old buildings, start a library of "old stuff."
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Cultivate a library of "old stuff." America is crowded with elderly buildings, and these buildings are filled with demanding clients. Take New York City, for instance. Here you'll find thousands of steam-heating systems dating back to the 19th Century. Let's say a client takes over two or three stories in one of these antique high-rises. They want to remove the old-fashioned radiators and put in something more modern. If you're the engineer on this project, you really have to know what you're looking at and that's where the "old stuff" comes in. You also have to realize that any changes you make to this old system will affect not only your client, but every other tenant in the building.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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