And so it is with distinct pleasure that I welcome
you to this Virginia Tech tradition. The Vecellio Distinguished
Lecture. I'm Chairman de la Garza and I have the honor
of serving as the Vecellio professor of construction engineering.
And before we begin a life to review some safety
and logistic details. There are two exit doors in
this auditorium. The one who came in on your
right side and the one on the left side.
At the end of the lecture. I invite interview
to join us at the reception at the four year
of the in the student ambassadors will guide you to
that location. I'd like to begin these proceedings by
thinking the Vecellio family who's endowment has made this lecture
series possible. Thank you for what you do to
support us. Our students in our program representing the
family is Michael Vecellio. Who to point out
culture his vacation to be here. Michael, thank
you for coming. It is also a tradition to
recognize past the city of uh, distinguished lecturers.
And I'd like to recognize Dr Mike Forster who was
the 2010, the Syrian distinguished lecture. Bye now
. I'd like to recognize individuals who have very significant
leadership responsibilities here at Virginia Tech with us. We
have the dean of the College of Engineering, dr
richard basis. We also have without the Dean of
the College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Professor Jack
Davis. We have the director of the Myers Loss
in School construction. Dr brian Kleiner, Thank you
. Thank you for joining us and most importantly for
greasing the com past that keeps this great university moving
towards True North, A very significant component of the
University of Development is the funding of scholarships and fellowships
. Earlier this summer. Through a very competitive process
, we selected six the Sirio underground scholars In one
Basilio Graduate Fellow. I would like to introduce them
to you. Page. Please come up. Page
is from Arlington Virginia and she enjoys playing football,
tennis and volleyball. When she finishes her degree she
would like to work overseas. Sam ferrara from alexandria
Virginia enjoys hiking, playing the piano and we like
to work for a general contractor congregation in a hell
from Manassas Virginia enjoys human power submarines. Not sure
what against those. And he too would like to
work for his contractor upon his graduation. Mhm Madigan
from Virginia and there is hiking, soccer in traveling
. He also likes to work overseas and work for
a large firm matt standard from herndon Virginia enjoys ice
hockey and listening to music. He would like to
work with. Congratulations on a design firm, Casey
vegetable from Last one North Carolina. Big important she
enjoys soccer, fantasy football and probably I would like
to work also for an international company formed graduation nella
Mohammadi from Iran, enjoy swimming, running and I'm
not sure that's true. Making sense of things here
when she said it, I'm not sure that that
is true. Uh hoop organizations. She would like
to become one of the pioneers in the development of
research and energy engineering and technology. Please join me
in congratulating. Yeah. Now to our guest of
honor Stephen Ayers is the 11th architect of the Capitol
. He was appointed to this position by President Barack
Obama and was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate
prior to his appointment, Dr Ayers was a general
engineer with the voice of America. He also served
as an officer in the United States Air Force Dr
Ayers is a licensed architect in California. A fellow
of the american Institute of Architects and a leed accredited
professional. He completed his national science degree in architecture
at the University of Maryland, received his master of
science degree, insistence management from the University of southern
California and was awarded an honorary doctor of public design
by the boston Architectural College in recognition of his service
as a champion of historic preservation, great public design
and sustainability. In 2011, Dr Ayers received the
prestigious construction industry institutes Harold Age Don't Award for Excellence
. Subsequently in 2013, Dr Ayers was inducted into
the National Academy of Construction. Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome the architect of the capitol and the 2014
the city distinguished lecturer, the honourable Stephen Ayers,
everybody liked the photos of my doggies, The Blonde
one. It was her birthday that day. So
that's why she was wearing her little to to I
am delighted to be here. Thank you so much
for inviting me to be with you today and uh
speak with you this evening. I thought when I
spoke with jim and and invited me to speak and
he said, we'd love for you to come.
I said, what would you like me to talk
about? And the best thing about that is he
says, you can talk about anything you want,
which is exciting for me. So tonight you're going
to get a little bit of who the architect of
the capitol is. I just can't help myself.
But to share with you the great work we are
doing in your capital. And then we're going to
get a little folksy and talk about some leadership lessons
that's meant to be a little fun. So look
out for that. So, first a little bit
about the architect of the capitol, I like to
use these four images to describe who we are and
what we do. First, as our moniker would
tell you the architect of the capitol. We are
responsible for all of the design and construction of all
of the buildings on capitol hill. All of the
buildings for the legislative branch of the government, planning
, design, construction, maintenance operations. The second
photograph is a photograph of the historic grounds that surround
your capital grounds that were Designed by Frederick Law Homestead
in 1874 and Constructed through 1894. These are historic
grounds with almost dead, of course, being the
preeminent landscape architect at the time. Thirdly, when
the Congress wants to condition a piece of artwork,
that's my responsibility to oversee perhaps a competition as we
help for rosa parks that recently came into our statuary
collection or whether it's a white marble statue of every
vice president that served all of the artwork collection.
Both frescos and artwork and the statuary collection are part
of the architects responsibility and maintaining aesthetic judgment as what
comes into the congressional collection and what doesn't. And
then, lastly, with 2.5 million people a year
coming to visit their capital from all over the world
, visitor services is really important to us. It's
important to the Congress and therefore, obviously it's important
to me. And we work hard at providing uplifting
, inspirational and educational visits to people that come to
the capital, as well as another million visitors a
year to the United States botanic Garden at the foot
of Capitol Hill. And we carry on George Washington's
vision of educating the public about the importance of plants
and botany and horticulture in our society today. So
this great city of Washington, D. C.
Is a planned city. And how did this capitol
building become such ah a symbol of our representative democracy
and our Or so iconic? That is, well
, it started with George Washington and Pierre L'enfant in
1791. As they planned this great city of Washington
and they put the capitol building. Yeah, like
capitol building. Is there the White House, is
there? This great national mall is here. And
this capitol building really dominates the city of Washington.
And it does so because of these wonderful radiating streets
that long font and vision and created. And you
can see this beautiful capitol for miles and miles away
. As I approached the city every morning, I've
been, I ascend the 58th Street 58 blocks away
and have a view the capital. And it really
dominates this great city as you can see it here
, sitting atop jake until The hill that long font
in 1791 called a pedestal awaiting a monument. And
even at night you can see how this great capital
dominates the city and how everything in the city is
organized around the capitol building, the heart of the
city. And many people often ask me how it
got that way, How does it come to be
? And many people think that there's a zoning ordinance
that says no building can be taller than they have
. That's not really how Washington got its character.
It really happened with long fonts vision early in the
late 1700s that says, I want an open area
city one with great views and lan fan says the
width of our streets equals the height of our buildings
plus 20 ft. What does that give you?
That gives you a city with wide boulevards and expansive
. Use an open, airy and livable streets.
And that's what Washington is. It's not like new
york city, it's not like Atlanta. So let
me show you my little portion of the city,
the portion for which I'm responsible. Yeah, there
we go. You see if I can get that
to start. Here we go. So the architect
is responsible from 3rd Street that starts capitol hill.
You see Union Square there in the Great Grant Memorial
, of course, the capitol building, which we
affectionately called the Big house. Mm. And our
our area goes down to Union Station. As we
mentioned, as I spoke to some of the students
today, the Thurgood marshall Federal Judiciary Building. Beautiful
building by Edward Larrabee Barnes. We have our own
police force. Me and two other counterparts also oversee
a police force of 1800 sworn police officers. Buildings
for the United States Senate. The beautiful roman temple
design cast Gilbert Supreme Court. The real treasure of
capitol hill is the thomas jefferson building for the Library
of Congress. And you'll see buildings here for the
House of Representatives. And you may not know that
we also have a power plant where we make all
of the steam and chilled water to heat The nearly
50 structures for which were responsible 17.5 million square feet
of space. And we employ 2300 employees with an
annual budget of about$600 million dollars a year to
run the buildings and infrastructure on Capitol Hill. Here
, of course, is, yeah, United States
botanic garden and back to the capital. Here are
The 10 gentlemen that preceded me in my office.
I am the 11th architect of the Capitol. There
have been 11 of us in our history and the
city of Washington, D. C. from 1793
, where dr William Thornton won the first design competition
for the Capitol Building. And it's interesting to know
that the first nine were lifetime appointments. So many
of these gentlemen served in office for many, many
years, in fact, 20 to 30 years.
And the Congress after the ninth architect right there imposed
term limits on the architects office. So, uh
, the 10th architect Alan Hantman, my predecessor and
myself served 10 year terms in office. So that's
a little bit about the architect, maybe a word
or two about myself of course. And this is
the most important part right here. Everybody get that
. And we're allowed, I spoke today, we're
allowed to be friends. Now, University of Maryland's
going to the Big ten's, we're not competitors,
we're friends now. So I'm a University of Maryland
School of Architecture Graduate. And from there I spent
some time and officers training school at lackland texas,
commissioned as an officer in the Air Force in California
. I went to grad school at Southern cow,
got out of the military. After five or six
years, interestingly enough, I got into the military
to travel and see the world. Got stationed in
California course. Then I got orders to Elmendorf Alaska
, which Alaska is not the place. When I
said I wanted to see the world. Alaska really
wasn't the place that I had in mind all of
the great places that I studied, an architecture school
of Greece and Italy and Turkey and these wonderful places
that rich in history. And I get orders to
Elmendorf Alaska. Yeah, so I resigned and went
back to Washington D. C. A year later
, I got a job with the voice of America
in the State Department. A year later I was
stationed in Greece and it's amazing, especially for students
. That's the way you like. It Oftentimes one
door is going to close on you and when it
does another door opens, you can't predict what's going
to happen in your life for your career. But
be open and flexible and don't let go of your
dreams and desires. So I spent six years living
right there on the island of Rhodes Greece and working
for the voice of America and the State Department,
working in Turkey and Albania and Germany and throughout the
country of grief. Great time of life. Mm
Who would have thought a country boy like me,
born right here in roanoke Virginia would have been appointed
to this role, appointed by the President of the
United States, Confirmed by the United States Senate,
as you can see here. And I was sworn
in by Chief Justice john roberts in my favorite place
in the capital building. The old Senate chamber designed
by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Okay, so that's a
couple of minutes about the architect of the capitol sort
of our legacy and maybe a few minutes about me
, I can keep going about me if you like
. We could spend all night talking about that if
you like. But perhaps I'll talk a little bit
about the work that we do. You know,
this is an election year. Every two years you
re elect your members of Congress and you elect a
third of the United States Senate and of course every
four years you elect the president. So my office
plays a really important role working behind the scenes to
make some of that happen. But when you elect
the president, the president's inaugurated on the west front
of the capital and we completely transform the west front
of the capital to construct this inaugural platform. We
usually start that in september the year before physical construction
leading up to uh january and this is what it
looks like. And here's your first quiz since matter
University. I'm going to have to give you a
test. Here's your first quiz for a presidential inauguration
. You'll see five flags here and I'll tell you
that that is the current flag of the United States
and this is the flag here and here of The
original 13 states. So the question for you is
that every presidential inauguration? What is that flag?
Yeah, I've got all night. Mhm. Flag
with the universe raised the flag when the union was
reestablished. That's a good guess but incorrect. It's
the flag of when the president's state came into the
union. So that flag and that flag are the
same and they change at every presidential inauguration. And
here's what it looks like from the stage and there's
yours truly getting a little grayer apparently and this is
what it looks like. And you can see this
is President Obama's inauguration. You can see the chief
justice, the president, this is Obama and the
two daughters there being sworn in and this is kind
of the congressional leadership here and President Obama's family.
And just look out the national model, look all
the way down to the memorial and beyond all the
way down to the Lincoln memorial. The number of
people that descend on this capitol building for a presidential
inauguration quiz. Number two here on inauguration. You
can see what it looks like. And on the
north side is where the print media is, Time
magazine Washington post. Print media is on that side
. And on this side you can see is the
photographers and videographers, the electronic media. Why would
we separate not because they don't like each other.
No guesses. Light. That's good. It is
like, yeah, so this is the appropriate light
for the sun coming over the capitol building for photographers
and videographers to get great pictures. And I'll go
back a slide and just mentioned just one of the
wonderful traditions. And when the president is standing here
, this is in january and it's cold. And
of course we have a heater under that floor that
keeps the president warm as he's giving his address to
the country, if not to the world. But
we also put a large piece of mahogany kind of
scab up mahogany beam underneath of him. So he
actually stands on it as he's giving his address to
the country. And then we take that and we
fashion A number of 100 gavels out of that.
And it's tradition for the architect to take that over
to the oval office and present that to the president
as our gift for his inauguration. And he'll take
those 100 gavels and pass them out to his friends
as Mementos as part of his presidential inauguration. So
constructing those stands, working behind the scenes to Pull
off a presidential inauguration, whether it's the 30,000 shares
on the West Front or the building of the inaugural
platform, it's important for us. And this capital
is not only where we inaugurate our presidents, it's
where we bid them farewell. That's where the nation
celebrates our independence with beautiful ceremonies. So not only
the presidential inauguration right now, we're approaching, if
you haven't noticed from the television and radio and print
ads were in the midst of a congressional election.
And when that happens as it did two years ago
, take, for example, the House of Representatives
, We had 90 members leave the house Two years
ago. So what does that mean? As a
building manager? That means I have 90 vacant offices
. And then we hold a lottery system where all
of the remaining members of Congress can bid on the
vacant offices and we manage that process and then we
move all of those members during the month of december
. So in that 30 days of December, We
moved 220 members of Congress from one office to another
. This wonderful ship. And for freshmen members to
come in and select their new office. Of course
freshmen have no seniority, so they are the last
to select. Don't generally get the offices overlooking the
back parking lot Until they get seniority and move up
. And it's often said to get a view of
the Capitol building out of your window as a member
of Congress, it takes 20 years to be of
office moves to be able to get that. So
we hold this lottery where members come in and with
the freshman lottery, we encourage them as they approach
the diet is to pick a number out of a
hat to determine what order they get to make their
selections. We said, you know, if you
do some kind of acrobatic move, it tends to
help you get a better number. So last year
we got a freshman member doing a T bo and
and there was one that actually did a cartwheel as
she approached the diet and true to form, these
members got great office weeks profession. Yeah, freshmen
are still a little malleable and they take direction from
us. You know, after that they're really telling
us what and then we go about moving these offices
and as we move those office and go in and
move those, you never know what you're going to
find. Whether it's a sharp work, a totem
pole or a bear skin rug or this might even
be your Virginia congressman. I think that is a
moose and I don't think you have those in Virginia
last time I checked. So presidential inaugurations are really
big events for us. Congressional moves are really big
events for us. There's kind of a regular battle
rhythm to those things. Mhm. Historic preservation is
also core to our mission and core to our stewardship
responsibilities, not just buildings, whether it's maintaining the
archives of the original drawings of the dome of the
capitol where the archives of Frederick Law Olmsted's original drawings
for the landscape of capitol square. We're caring for
the wonderful frescoes that Constantino Brumidi painted both in the
rotunda and throughout the corridors of the capitol building.
And this is important work and we've this is current
work happening in the capital. Now taking these wonderful
frescoes as well as temperatures back to their original luster
. They've been over painted 350 years of over painting
. They're soiled by some 70 fireplaces that still work
and are used virtually nonstop in the Capitol building.
smoking food production. All of that creates contaminants in
the air that us and our curatorial team work to
continue to preserve. He's great paintings and these really
irreplaceable treasures. And if you come to the capital
building today, you can see this work in progress
along the preservation line. Stone preservation is important to
us. Just the Capitol building being over 200 years
old, preserving the stone, whether it's sandstone or
marveled is important. And we've recently done a comprehensive
restoration of the Supreme Court building and part of that
was the restoration of the west front marble there.
And you can see some of that work. And
I guess my point here is the use of technology
technology that young men and women like you will bring
to organizations like mine have really helped us. And
here's an example of that, you know, to
clean stone like this. The typical way to do
that is seven or eight or 9 10 applications of
pulp this which is sort of a clay material on
there. You put it on, wet it dries
and draws the contaminants out of the stone and you
scrape it off and you put another layer and it's
a very labor intensive operation. And as we scaffold
at the Supreme Court we thought we'd bring in some
laser technology. Been around a little while but look
how quick laser technology. Just a handheld laser can
clean and conserve some of the stone on many of
our buildings. It's amazing the labor productivity, that
a simple tool like this has done to help our
work in our preservation. The laser of course heating
the contaminants of dirt on the stone, They expand
and fall right off this stuff. That's current work
you'll see at the Supreme Court as well. There
are also a number of major projects underway across the
capitol campus. The first is comprehensive work at our
powerful both on the refrigeration side and on the steam
generation side, A nearly$200 million dollar investment on
the refrigeration side of new refrigeration equipment and chillers,
chillers that are nearly as large as this room,
kind of industrial scale chillers. And then on the
steam production side, we're currently working with uh public
private partnership to bring in a cogeneration system to the
Capital Power plant, where we will make enough electricity
through a cogeneration plant to power the power plant.
And of course, the co part of that is
to take the heat from the manufacturer of electricity and
use that heat to boil water to make steam.
So using one process to create two products is an
incredibly efficient way too, to provide utility services.
The Cannon House Office building, dating back to 1908
, the oldest house office building. We just broke
ground on a ten-year restoration of that beautiful Bose arts
building designed by Career and Hastings, the largest endeavor
we will have ever undertaken in the architect of the
Capital's office And of course the restoration of 150 year
old Capitol Dome. This dome, while it may
look masonry is cast iron and it's actually a double
dome and you can see the inner dome right here
, an inner dome of cast iron and an outer
dome of cast iron that kind of reaches to this
guy and of course, topped by the beautiful statue
of freedom and the space between that inner and outer
dome, what we call the interstitial space there on
the right. And you can see how this dome
well, it's built in Washington. It's all from
past iron that was cast in Baltimore but primarily and
a new york city and shipped here by train and
brought up from trains of course and oxen and erected
with steam driven derricks. This is before electricity.
This kind of construction can have and while this beautiful
dome looks so great from the ground and iconic,
when you get up close to it, it's in
a significant state of disrepair. We've been monitoring the
cast iron. This outer shell of the dome for
about 10 years, 10 years ago. We had
about 360 deficiencies and a deficiency is a crack in
the cast iron. That's a water league or a
piece of ornamentation that has rusted all And a year
and a half ago. That had risen to 1300
water leaks and cracks and deficiencies in the dome of
the Capitol. And then this is what it looks
like. How close This is a large acorn.
About an£80 acorn that you see here that has
rusted off. And imagine what those pieces as they
fall to the roof of the capital. What they
might do to one underneath. This is an excellent
example of uh huh. The state of deterioration of
the current cast iron dome and you can see the
outer shell is about 3/8 cash buyers. And for
a building manager, what this means, I'll interpret
it for you is a water leak. Water of
course is not a good thing on the inside.
And some of the wonderful ornamentation. That's yeah,
falling off this cast iron dome. So we approached
the Congress and saw funding for A comprehensive restoration of
this 150 year old known. And you'll see this
work happening on Capitol Hill right now. And you
might ask, how do you fix that? And
we've worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology
for a number of years determining whether We could well
or we could braise at 280 ft in the air
and did a number of tests with cast iron.
We want to get it to About 700°F before we
start a weld or braise and then well and then
cool it. And we found that many of those
welds would re cracked because we just can't control the
temperature to be able to effectively, well, they're
braised at that height. So we're using a lock
and stitch technology and you can see that here on
a typical dutchman. This is a typical deficiency that's
repaired by cutting it out and inserting a new dutchman
of cast iron. And let me show you how
that works. This locking stitch technology was brought by
power plants, big power plants where a piston would
crack and this is how you might repair. You
drill out a whole along the crack and insert a
double hook threaded him the head of the pin shears
off at the right torque. And then you grind
down those pins and you do it again, that's
a typical repair of a crack. You grind down
all of those pins and then you lay out a
series of stitches, like you might stitch a piece
of clothing and you put in another piece of cast
iron that's actually hammered in to the other cast iron
and then you grind that down, you can see
one that has just installed there and that's what they
look like, that's a repaired and then a repainted
crack repair and that's how we're doing and this is
what it will look like. The dome is being
scaffolding now and of course, there are 13 layers
of lead based paint on the dome that lead based
paint has taken all through a a sandblasting. Or
we actually use garden to do it under these enclosures
. And those enclosures move around there under negative pressure
, their large vacuum trucks that create the negative pressure
that go up to these enclosures, They suck the
air out of those enclosures, essentially as you're blasting
that paint off, it becomes airborne. Of course
, we have to capture all of that and dispose
of it as hazardous waste. So that's how it's
done. And this is what the capital looks like
today. If you were to come see it,
scaffolding is in the process of being installed, there
is around the paris style or the lower level of
the capital. It will go all the way up
to the base of the statue of freedom as we
begin the repainting resealing and cast iron repair. That's
the 2nd phase. The third phase is that interstitial
space between the outer shell and the inner shell.
And then the final phase is the repair of the
cached iron in the rotunda or the heart of the
capitol building itself. And all of that has to
be done by when The next presidential inauguration in January
2017. That we have a hard deadline that we
need to be done By October of 2016 So that
we can start construction of the inaugural platform and be
ready for January 27 before we start to work on
the outside. This is heavy industrial work. We
have to protect the people on the inside. So
if you were to visit the capital today, This
is what the rotunda looks like. This is a
five layer safety netting that prevents people and cast iron
and other debris from falling in and potentially hurting the
2.5 million people that come to visit the heart of
the capital building every year. I heard not long
ago that this is our new national doughnut. Shut
up. Yeah, Sure. But let me show
you that took two weeks to install and here's two
weeks in 20 seconds that are okay. So This
work hasn't been done in 50 years in 1959 and
1960, when the West Front of the Capital was
extended. The cast iron dome was refurbished at that
time as well. So it's been 50 years,
certainly today's practices and today's caulking and painting technology,
we're quite confident that we're going to get More than
50 years out of this next repair. Okay,
that's enough of that. Let's change gears a little
bit and talked about perhaps some folksy leadership with.
I've worked for And in the Congress for 18 years
and had a few successes and perhaps a few failures
along the way. Maybe I have a lesson in
leadership to pass along to young men and women in
the room, anybody knows who jane Goodall is jane
Goodall studying monkeys or gorillas that is. And she
lived with them and work with them day in and
day out. And of course on the jane Goodall
. But I have lived And work in the lion's
den of Congress for 18 years and I know what
it's like. No, and I've had some success
in some failures and I thought I'd share some of
that with you. It's a 10uous job. Appointed
by the president, the executive branch, but work
for the legislative branch. That's awesome. It's a
10uous situation. Sometimes here's an interesting example. I
was called to a congressman's office some time ago and
I went into the congressman's office and the lights were
off. That's red flag number one. I went
into his personal office, the lights were off.
Red flag number two and he says, Mr Ayers
, I need your help. This country is addicted
to foreign oil and you and I need to get
us off foreign and you need to do that by
installing solar panels on the Dome of the United States
capitol so that we can show this nation that the
key to our energy independence, the solar energy.
What are you going to do? Of course you're
gonna say no. As I mentioned earlier without using
the word no. And you're going to put solar
panels on the back parking law and we're not going
to do that to the Dome of the United States
. Canada leaders find ways for win win situation.
I love lists, you know, the top 10
stuff anybody else love lists? I love that kind
of stuff. Love to study back and here are
maybe some of the things I'll talk about very,
very briefly on leadership. There's a lot to be
learned by Colin Powell and joe marcelli and jim Collins
and even Rudy Giuliani. There's also a lot to
be learned from Cyrus degrade. I don't wonder who
are you over here? No Sybers degree and perhaps
there's really nothing new today since the time of Cyrus
. Perhaps there's really nothing new since the time of
facilities in terms of leadership. So Colin path,
he's a recognized leader. Here's Colin Powell's list.
I love this stuff. I love reading things like
it really motivates me and have it encouraged me to
think about my own leadership style. It ain't as
bad as you think. Get mad and get over
it. Yeah. And perhaps here's a couple of
things that I'm good at and it's important for young
men and women as you get into leadership roles,
to be able to self reflect and to know what
you're good at and data and to be honest with
yourself and be critical of yourself and your own self
evaluation. I'm an eternal optimist. have a 2300
employees. Sometimes things go wrong, but it never
gets me down and people watch what leaders do check
small things. My staff hates this one because I
know the details and I take the time to know
the details. Leaders need to know what's going on
and I hire scuba diaries, not surfers, not
people that skim the top and ride the top.
I hire people that dig down and know what's going
on. Perhaps there's some things that maybe I'm not
that good at it. Maybe letting adverse facts,
getting the in the way of decision making as leaders
make decisions. You're going to get input from everybody
and everything and you have to sift out the wheat
from the chaff so leaders do and figuring out what's
right and what's wrong. I'm not letting you,
you know, your naysayers influence your decisions. Well
, if Colin Powell can make a list of 13
, Surely Stephen Ayers can make a list of six
. And here's my list of six. Oops.
Let's talk about the first one for a month.
We don't want that. We want this, people
will whack a stranger. What does that mean?
What it means to me? And I hope that
the young men and women in the room is that
you were doing a marvelous job today at academics and
learning the technical details of what you'll need to be
successful. And one of the key ingredients to being
successful is relationships, relationships are the key to success
and investing in relationships is vitally important. When I
became architect of the capitol, my organization had a
couple of slip ups and what happens in the Congress
when there's a slip up, It's public. And
as soon as something, what happened, a member
of Congress would issue a press release, have a
press conference and say the architect did this, the
architect of that, why does that happen? Because
they don't know me, I'm a stranger to that
, but if I know them and I build relationships
before things happen, that's the key to success.
Coupled with my cute little analogy of trust. Trust
goes in very slowly. It takes time and effort
and focus and I mean effort to build trust,
but trust comes out very quickly and you can lose
it very quickly. So it's incredibly important as you
embark on your careers to invest in building relationships and
invest in building trust, you can't just talk about
it, it takes time, it takes effort and
you need to be strategic about it and invest the
time to be successful. Mhm secondly, as the
leaders, you have two years and one mouth for
a reason that leaders need to do twice as much
listening as they do talk. Benjamin Henry Latrobe,
The 4th Architect of the Capitol, should have known
that and he fought back and forth and back and
forth with thomas Jefferson about the design national statuary hall
or the old house chamber. As you can see
right here. He didn't listen and ultimately lost his
job because he didn't listen. I serve on the
President's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and recently was on
a Section one or 6 case where there are just
in tractable differences between the Cape Wind Wind Farm electrical
production company that wanted to do something and the local
community And why does that happen? Because the tune
aren't listening and communicating to one and we took a
panel up and met with the community, met with
tribal leaders and found solutions to their problems. You
can't find the solutions if you don't know what they
are and you have to listen, listen twice as
much as you talk as a leader, next is
to expect what you inspect. And this comes from
my father who said this to me all the time
. And as a young man I really didn't get
, I didn't know what he was talking about.
Does that mean expect what you inspect and he would
say if you expect something to happen but never inspected
along the way to see that it's going to happen
. You should have no expectation that it's going to
happen. You got to get them. That's a
little complicated. It was for me as a,
as a young teenager you have to pay attention to
the details. That's what leaders do and take Rudy
Giuliani for example, here's his list but Rudy Rudy
Giuliani said, if we take care of the guys
that are coming out in new york city and washing
the windows at every stoplight, if we get rid
of them, the murder rate in new york city
is going to plummet. That's what he did and
that's what happened. And he set up this incredible
system of citywide measurements and metrics that enabled his success
called comstat or comstock. I think it was interesting
really. And for us in my organization, we
measure virtually everything but we keep it fresh. We
might measure something for six or eight months and it
no longer provides any value to us and we'll take
it off our dashboard and Look at something else.
The Congress implemented the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and
EEC 2007 and said You have to reduce your energy
by three per year Every year for the next 10
years to achieve 30 energy reduction. And we thought
are we going to do that? Well. We're
going to physically measure our energy production with these high
tech meters. That's one form of measurement and it
got a significant reduction results. But similarly when my
leaders are sitting around the conference table with me and
we put up on a screen just like this measurements
of everything that we do, you get results,
you put it up on the board and it's not
a matter of treating people. It's a matter of
what can the organization bring to bear to help you
improve your performance? You are holding us down as
a team. What can the rest of us do
to fill that gap? Just measuring elevators. I'm
responsible for 300 elevators. Something as benign as that
. But if you get a senator stuck in the
elevator with a reporter and they missed the boat,
your phone is gonna ring. We can't let that
happen. How do we prevent that from happening by
measuring performance ahead of a number of years ago?
I looked at our inventory numbers and we were carrying
nearly$60 million dollars of spare parts,$60 million
dollars of inventory on hand and I thought seems like
a lot. Let's develop some measurements and some metrics
to see how quickly this inventory actually turns over and
its report on it every month in our building performance
. And what happens when you start to measure those
things. You go from$60 million dollars of inventory
on hand.$26 million dollars of inventory on.
It's magical. Our industry partners are important to us
are architects and engineers and general contractors. They want
to be paid in 30 days. So I said
, they're important. Let's measure. Are we paying
in 30 days? I hear you telling me,
but show me the data And the data says,
well we've processed maybe 7000 invoices a year and 2000
of them are paid on time. And we've been
able to drive those numbers act in 2008 late and
we've been able to drive those numbers down by putting
them on a dashboard and measure whether it's furniture or
water testing or over time or fire alarms. Anything
that were responsible for we measure and we report on
it's enabled significant success. This has been a big
transformation for us in my organization to under promise and
over deliver and my organization had a culture of the
opposite of that is to over promise and under deliver
. But that's not what leaders do and that's not
what success is. When I took over the capitol
visitor center project and 2006 or seven a project that
was significantly behind schedule and way over budget. I
went before the Congress and said I need three months
to figure this out and I'm going to come back
to you with a date and a cost and we're
going to meet and that's what we do. It's
one of my favorite videos about teamwork and here's a
guy, a home owner of that bought himself a
nice new computer and got it delivered by Fedex.
Yeah. Mhm. Little did this guy know the
homeowner had a video and he put it on youtube
Got eight million hits and they lost. Oh,
I don't know what it was 10 or 11 billion
dollars in market share for the next day because one
employee is looking out for himself and not looking out
for the team. Here's an important concept for my
organization. That's a service organization. We provide service
to the Congress. This comes from Joma kelly's book
, the new gold standard. It's about the Ritz
Carlton Mystique, the mistake that everyone worried about when
the Ritz and Marriott merged a year or two ago
and everyone thought we're going to lose the Ritz Carlton
mistake. An incredibly successful brand and one of the
important things about the Ritz Carlton brand is that if
your customer asks, you've already been, this is
transformational concept in my organization, an organization. When
I asked my team, they will tell me,
we give our customers everything they want. They don't
get. If your customer asked for it, you've
already failed. You have failed to know your customer
, You failed to anticipate their needs and you failed
to satisfy their needs before they ask you for it
. A great story, ingelise book is just about
it. A salesman that comes into an airport,
hits his rental car stops by the 7 11 picks
up a gatorade, drinks it on the way.
Valet's his car. The next morning when he gets
out, picks his car back up and sitting right
there in his dashboard is an ice cold blue gatorade
. He didn't have to ask for it. The
Ritz Carlton trains their employees to see what's happening around
. That's how they create the Prince mistake. That's
how we want to treat our customers heading towards the
end here. Jim Collins Good is the enemy of
grid. Sometimes when you're good and an organization gets
good, you get complacent and your employees will back
off of there. Stop pushing so hard and Collins
in his book talks about company after company after company
that suffer from being good, which prevents them from
being great. Here's an example of that safety is
incredibly important in my organization. And in 1998 We
were injuring 18 out of every 100 employees with an
injury. It was the worst in the federal government
and we invested a great deal of time and energy
and policy and training and people to fix that important
problem. And what did we do? We went
from bad good. That's good, right there.
This zero is great. And that chart tells me
that we've leveled off. We backed off of it
. We're not pushing as hard as we need to
get to bring. So there is three or 4
or five. Actually, I think there are six
of Stephen Ayers lessons learned, leadership lessons learned that
. Yes, but perhaps we don't need this demon
airs and we don't need the colder pal or the
Rudy Giuliani or any of them. Or perhaps we
really need. Is Cyrus the Great. Is there
anything really new in terms of leadership today? Between
Cyrus the Great of the great Persian empire that you
can see here. Kazakhstan Kurdistan in this river.
Oman Georgia, Arabia, Turkey Israel, one of
the biggest and best and most successful empires ever.
How did Cyrus the Great become such a great leader
? Well, he wrote it all down for us
on the Cyrus cylinder and I had a chance to
go see it at the Sackler gallery recently. And
right there on that little football size cylinder. Is
everything you really need to know about leadership? You
can see it here close in the Soon a form
kind of embedding these ah indentations in this wet clay
. The language of the Time Cyrus says, give
your employees all they need and now follow you to
the end of the earth. I forget. How
about this? Okay, brevity is the soul of
command. This is what this is several 100 years
ago. Cyrus the Great was saying, leaders,
you need to know you have two years and one
amount for a reason. If you're a leader that's
talking too much, you're desperate, Even Cyrus the
Great knew that and here's Cyrus's list that you can
see from the Cyrus cylinder. Debrief leaders need to
be a force for good. You need to have
a little fun, be courteous and come. And
lastly, if you don't believe Cyrus, let's take
you way back to ancient Greece and facilities and lucidity
says of all manifestations of power for strength is the
most important. So I will leave you with my
favorite image of the capital and thank all of you
for coming procedure. Thank you Stephen. That was
fun. I simply want you have time for a
couple of questions before we well things and you know
yourself, you have a question. Please raise your
hand. Yes, speak loud higher. Uh huh
. Yeah. So the question was, did the
earthquake that we had here a year or two or
so ago have any damage to the capitol building?
And I told a couple of students today that's interesting
that the capitol building is an unreinforced masonry building and
all of our unreinforced masonry buildings on capitol hill really
suffered no damage from the earthquake but our new steel
frame, stone clad buildings moved a lot more in
the earthquake and we had some plaster damage and some
utility damage, minor things like that, certainly nothing
structural, you know, structural damage happened across capitol
. You're welcome. Uh huh. Yeah, I
saw that. She was the best time. Thank
you lasers. What time is out there now for
once the restoration process is finished. So there is
a product that we use on some of our historic
stuff. Stones and solid and I at a lack
of the name of that product right now, but
we do use a current day product that helps prevent
that kind of deterioration that you see on much of
that stone. It's good stuff. I'll send you
an email that the product me if you're interested in
that been really helpful for us to to prevent further
deterioration at the start, high in the back traffic
and pollution ever been an issue for the duration of
So certainly you know that what you see on that
historic stone comes from pollution pollution in the city vehicles
, power plants, you name it, It comes
from that. So you know, that certainly plays
an important factor in Yeah, the care of stone
, but there is no pushing moving traffic away from
the Yeah, no. So you know, the
capital is the people's house. It needs to be
open. And that's an important concept for the Congress
. They do not want to lock down or put
a fence around it. Welcoming people to the capital
is important. It is your capital and the Congress
really does think that's important. Hi restaurant, more
amenable. So that's a great question for preservation.
As you have to, uh, make difficult decisions
between something you preserve or something to create new.
And you know, as, as I've been talking
a bit about the restoration of the capitol dome,
often I'll get questions. Why didn't you just take
the dome down, put it back up with aluminum
or some current day technology like that, Which,
you know, you could, but you know,
our preservation standards that we have developed and implemented through
the Congress is that we're going to preserve as much
original fabric as we can. And that's why when
We got to 1300 cracks, we thought we are
losing too much original fabric of this dome and we
need to get in and restore it. So we
think that's an important part of our stewardship responsibilities to
maintain it as it was originally. Thank you everybody
. Before we, before we finalize these proceedings,
we would like to present a speaker today with some
talking to show our appreciation for spending the day with
us. I should tell you a couple of things
first. Obvious things as the architect of the capitol
. He is a 100 federal employees. And what
that means to us is that there are very severe
and real restrictions as to what kind of gifts we
can present to him. Uh Yeah it's so I
I didn't try to find out if public institutions like
Virginia Tech, I would have a higher limit on
the level of gift that we could present. And
the answer was now. And so we have to
we have to really look for things on sale To
not exceed the$75 limit. Anything about$75.
He needs to turn it over to the spectrum general
. Uh and we certainly didn't want to have it
. Uh So we we really worked very hard at
finally adequate uh Virginia Tech items. That would be
under$75. So I wanted to explain to everybody
and to you the nation. So uh Casey my
. Mhm. Exactly. The price tag is on
. We wanted to make sure the inspector general knew
that they were under$75. You you have this
everybody. Yeah. Or collect. Yeah. Great
tutorial tour of Virginia tech. Thank you. There's
something else in the night. Yes. Oh yeah 953 01:13:28.649 --> A:middle L:90% mm.