East Region - News

Leadership in the Construction Industry - 2 October 2007

In the impressive Centre for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Cambridge, over 50 invited members of the construction industry, planning decision-makers, company directors and associates, post-graduate students and other leaders from Eastern region met to discuss leadership in the current construction industry.

The discussion was started with the views of 4 eminent leaders - from a Director in local Government, an operations director from the contracting industry, an MD of a supply logistics company (fresh from T5) and to top the bill, the Chairman of CIC, Nick Raynsford MP.

In the hour's discussion that followed, points made included the need for and nature of "vision" in the current context of sustainability, especially the need for energy and CO2 reduction; also how best to meet the need for new skills as emphasis shifts from site-work to factory. There was a brisk discussion about the respective leadership roles of clients, designers, constructors, trainers and researchers, with a majority view that more is needed from Central (as well as Regional and Local) Government to achieve enough progress; especially when, in practice, profit margins are threatened when there isn't a level playing-field. Similarly, there was doubt whether the leadership of the best design/construction companies and CITB/SSC could/would in fact do enough to produce sufficient professional/management/sustainability expert/artisan workforce to cope with the continued high levels of activity, and without driving up inflation further still.

There was also a variety of views on models of leadership in the industry; although vision, communication and optimism/confidence are almost always ingredients, there are examples of greater autocracy - it was the more authoritarian Wellington who won, not  the inclusive Napoleon! There was also some well-pointed discussion about how the emerging planning system would play out in terms of shifting the balance of where leadership can come from.

Generating such high-level discussion between such a wide range of participants, and then feeding the conclusions into Regional and Local planning and management is one of the key roles of CIC-East. After the discussion, there was a celebration of the signing of a pact between CIC-East and i10, a consortium of eleven regional Universities with a role of moving research out into industry.

Intended to go much further than a simple interface with existing university built environment departments, the agreement encourages knowledge transfer and research involvement over a broad range of academic endeavour.

Led by a steering group with Dr Saul Humphrey of RG Carter as Chairman, and with members from academia and the industry, opportunities include increased:

1. Knowledge transfer
2. Industry based research
3. Cross fertilisation between disciplines
4. Under graduate and post graduate involvement
5. Professional development

Expect many exciting innovations with completely new ways of thinking and significant improvement in value and performance from this agreement.