Page 45 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

24 CHAPTER 1

The notion of craftsmanship I have in mind goes well beyond the capacity to do
something well, something Richard Sennett describes beautifully when he notes:

Craftsmanship has a cardinal virtue.... It is commitment. It’s not simply that the
obsessed, competitive craftsman may be committed to doing something well, but more
that he or she believes in its objective value.... Getting something right, even though
it may get you nothing, is the spirit of true craftsmanship.... Commitment entails clo-
sure, forgoing possibilities for the sake of concentrating on one thing. 38

The craft we ply is that of creating and nurturing community. How we engage the
various people who work with us—designers, architects, land planners, engineers,
builders, financiers—is part of that craft. How we draw up our legal documents and
analyze our financial returns is also part of that craft. As is the actual construction.
Through our specific roles with the company, by means of our various vocations, we
look at what we develop from a long-term, life cycle perspective. In that sense, our
sense of values and our practice of values become inseparable.

4. Diversity of Work Opportunities: At first blush, the opportunity for diverse
work experiences is directly at odds with the notion of craftsmanship. To some extent,
that’s true. While craftsmanship is about focusing on one thing over an extended
period of time, diverse work opportunities convey the sense of jumping around from
one type of task to another. But the type of opportunity I am talking about here is not
jumping broadly around at any given point in time, but probing deeply into the vari-
ous levels of what we do. It’s about deep time, not broad time. Layering complex skills
one upon the other over an extended period of time. Developing sophistication in
one’s capacities. In this sense, diversity of work opportunities and craftsmanship are
powerfully connected.
As odd as it sounds, we have a succession plan in place for key management posi-
tions that goes out fifteen years from the present time. Strong young leadership in
place today is positioned to be senior management in the distant future. For this young
leadership cadre to develop fully, they need that diversity of work experiences. It’s
something that larger companies have a much easier time structuring, but it’s not an
easy thing to provide in small companies such as ours.
But the rationale for diverse work opportunities goes well beyond succession plan-
ning. Development work, done well, calls for integrating a wide knowledge of disci-
plines—history and geography, geology, biology, and hydrology, sociology and
communications, finance, ecology and organizational design, psychology and land
planning—just to name a few. Diversity of work opportunities provides exposure to
these various disciplines, and it’s a good fit with a business looking to harmonize its
financial orientation with social and environmental concerns. More fundamentally,
providing diverse work opportunities, with the objective of achieving craftsmanship,
helps replace the more rote sense of having a job (or a profession, even) with having
a vocation for life.