Let me start over again
[LAUGHTER] Schnabel is about 65 years old.
We have about 25 offices.
Most of them traditionally had been on the East Coast.
However, recently we've opened up
several offices West of the Mississippi,
floating around the Colorado area,
Seattle, and down in Austin, Texas.
Even though it's been a challenging year,
it's been a good year for the company
we're continuing to grow
and service new clients around the country.
Civil Engineering is going to be an exciting business,
I think for the future few years to come here.
I think we're never going to run out of
infrastructure challenges and that's exactly what
we're in school to learn
and to deliver some great products
here as the economic recovery continues.
Given these challenges we face today,
the opportunities we see in the future,
we host this lecture each year to try to bring
you a different perspective on our industry.
Rather than the academia that you hear day in,
day out and that's why you're here,
we think it's important that you hear
some other perspectives as well and we
bring you a person senior in our industry that could
share some of the experiences that they've had throughout
their careers and today is no exception to that.
Today we're going to bring you somebody
from the Schnabel family.
That's a little bit different than usual,
like everything else in 2020.
It's a little bit different.
Today we have Walt Rabe, our President and
CEO to join us and we're happy to have
him as our lecturer
this year and believe that he's going to bring
some interesting visions and
experience stories to share with you.
Your stories after your career evolves may change,
but I think you'll probably
find looking back on this that you'll have
a lot of similarities in your career development,
potentially even broader and more exciting.
Mr. Rabe completed his master's degree in
engineering in Virginia Tech in 1991.
He went on to work for
several consulting and contracting firms
for a few years after that and then
joined Schnabel about 20 years ago.
He's held several roles within the company,
primarily in our Northern Virginia offices where he led
several large infrastructure and
commercial development projects,
and recently and more significantly he's worked
on a lot of our international projects,
so I can't count the number of countries he's
been to and many of them I
don't particularly want to visit,
but he said some great experience
and I think he'll share a few of those today.
He rose to the role of CEO in
2016 and continues to
lead the firm through this challenging time.
We look forward to continued growth
and success with his leadership.
Without further ado,
I'm going to welcome Walt
and his presentation from Hokie to CEO,
sharing a few experiences and lessons from the journey.
Thank you for joining us [APPLAUSE]
[BACKGROUND].
Thank you.
Let me know if everything looks well on the screen,
now that everybody is far enough apart,
I'm going to go ahead and take this off.
I was told it'll be okay.
The closest person to me is Alan.
I think we have to worry about Alan,
Alan is coming home with me but
anyhow it's been quite a journey.
There we go. I just want
to echo Allan's thanks to the university,
to the faculty here,
and I want to thank the CGPR as well.
Thank you Alan for asking me
to just step in and do this novel lecture this year.
There's a long history of
very accomplished people that have done
this lecture and I feel small compared to a lot of them,
but I do appreciate it and I appreciate you all coming.
Hopefully, this will be entertaining music for you,
there'll be a lot of
self-deprecating stories about myself.
This is a good year for that.
These are crazy times with the pandemic going on.
There's a lot of political divide in the country.
There's a lot of unrest out in society with
social justice outcry and things like that.
We're going to try to keep this a
little lighter of the talk today.
Hopefully, we can get a little humor and go away,
a little background about me.
I'm from a military family.
My dad went West Point,
was in the Air Force for many years.
He did end up in
the Washington DC area when I was about six years old.
From that point on,
we pretty much stayed in DC.
I had five sisters
and we're all in schools and he didn't want to
move around so we took a lot of different posts
around DC and that really helped the family.
Generally, the other thing he really did was
it got me laser-focused
on the best university in
my opinion and that's Virginia Tech.
You guys are at a tremendous institution here and I can
tell you people that graduate from here,
whether it's an undergraduate or
graduate degree are highly sought after
and I've never been
disappointed by a Virginia Tech grad in my entire career.
You've got a lot going for you as you graduate from here.
I did get a bachelor's and a
master's here as Alan indicated,
I went straight through did about six years.
I guess it'll be a little secret.
When people talk to me about masters,
I got here, they ask if I don't get in.
Mitchell was here yet and I just answer no but
the truth of the matter is I was in
the H&H programming here in Virginia Tech.
My master's focused on water.
The first three years of my career,
I spent trying to find ways to
find water and moving safely from
one place to another and then when I
switched over to be in a geotechnical engineer,
I was trying to figure out ways to
get rid of water and avoid water.
Definitely, it's been an
interesting ride in that regard.
I do have a son that's here now.
He wasted year of his life
at some other university up in
Charlottesville but he finally
found the light and he's here.
Right now, he's in the core cadets.
It's not hard to pick out because if you see
a core guy walking
around with tattoos on both of his arms,
that's him, another 1,700 people that
probably only one like that and
the court is pretty strict there.
Anyhow, a lot of ties to Virginia Tech.
Leadership novels since 1989
has been by Virginia Tech graduates,
whether it be a graduate degree
or undergraduate degree in that,
Ray Martin lead the firm maybe
'90-2002 and then Gordon Mathewson 2002-2006.
A lot of them are Virginia Tech grads.
My career is,
what I say here is a little play on
the three bears story and right out of college,
I went to work for Bechdel.
Most of you probably know what Bechdel does,
a very large contractor who does work all over the world.
I enjoyed my time at Bechdel,
but after six or seven years,
I said, "You know what, this company is too large."
From there, I took a job within
a small consulting firm based in Greenville,
South Carolina and open
an office for them in Asheville, North Carolina.
Work there are a couple of years and said,
"You know what, this company is too small."
Then in 2001,
I left there and move back home in
Northern Virginia where my folks
were and white folks were,
fashionable and basically,
this one was just the right size.
That matters as you're looking at your career.
You can get lost in a large company.
Some people like to get lost like that.
There's a lot of prominence in
some of the large companies,
but it is a little more
difficult to move ahead and do other things.
One thing that I was able to
use is that when I switched ever
you do in geotechnical engineering.
That afforded me that the ability to do
that always looked at what I was doing, the H&H,
there are all these calculations in
the office and the geotechs were coming in dirty
and muddy and doing
a lot of crazy stuff and getting out in the field.
I kept looking and so that's what I want to do.
I went that route.
Like I said, there's a lot of
serious note going on around us,
so we're going to keep this light.
I'll talk a little bit about some of
the experiences that I've had throughout my career.
I think when I look back on
my career and look at where I am today,
I think where I am is not
because of the experiences I went through,
but how I went through
those experiences mold me into the person I am today.
You'll see it. I'll talk about a few themes here
and then at the end we'll take some questions.
Sorry. I mean new pickup with people. I apologize.
All right. Generally, everyone's pretty good.
Sorry about this.
[BACKGROUND]
Because
this computer is the cause I'm going to
mute. Sorry about that.
Okay. Real set.
You can make this, yeah.
Perfect. Thank you. Back to what I was saying,
as you start your career,
I strongly encourage you guys to raise your hand
and step up and
volunteer for things that nobody else wants to do.
Whether that's a relocation.
I relocated about five or six times in
my career and each
time it brought bigger and better opportunity.
I took a lot, about 10 assignments,
and took on challenging projects.
With that come sacrifice, it's not easy to move.
We all get in our comfort levels,
not easy to travel.
Some of us have young kids
but it does provide opportunity.
With the picture there you see is
project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
You can see the date stamp on there and
that was back in 2002,
not long after I started with Schnabel and that project
alone started a long career
for me in doing embassy work overseas.
I managed to get to a lot of countries and had a lot of
really positive experiences as
a result of that and that was
all a result of saying, yeah,
sure I'll go to Cambodia 12 time zones
away and even when nobody else wanted to go,
but it was really fantastic.
There we go. Talk a little bit
about another sacrifice in my career.
Basically, in 2009
I had to go over to Pakistan for a month.
I had a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old,
and it was certainly a sacrifice to go over there.
But it's something that really
changed my opinion of the world
and what the world's like.
It's known to be a fairly dangerous place,
but I didn't really firsthand
experience significant amounts of that.
I found the people there to be very accommodating,
and they would pretty much
go out of their way to do anything.
The gentleman at the top right picture
is a gentleman named Barbar,
he was my driver and I firmly believe that he would have
done anything he would have needed to do to
protect me should anything happen.
He drove me around Islamabad
for three weeks while I was in Islamabad.
Then he showed up there one morning and I said,
"You're driving me to the Peshawar",
which was a four or five-hour drive up into some of
the more remote and maybe a little
more risky parts of Pakistan.
I'm not sure if you can see in the upper left,
that's the picture at the
Islamabad embassy site that we were looking at.
Can anyone tell what that plant is?
Yeah, exactly.
It does grow like a weed over there.
It was pretty much everywhere.
I wasn't quite sure if it was
considering poor innocent me,
but I was pretty sure what it does.
I have a lighter there and I was trying to
dry this stuff and see if it smelled like that.
I had a lighter because I was burning wax for
the Shelby tubes to be clear about that.
Then the gentleman in
the picture in the middle actually,
he came up and he was looking at me
funny and I looked at him and I said,
"Is this what I think it is? "
He had this sheepish grin and he goes, "Yeah,
we call it bhang because the bad people like
to grind it up into a liquid and
then they mix it with water and drink it,
because it makes them feel no worries," he said,
"and it makes them hungry."
[LAUGHTER] In any case,
a lot of interesting things in Pakistan.
Like I said, Peshawar was
a little bit of a different story than Islamabad.
Islamabad is a very structured,
organized city that's been built in the last 40 years.
It's fairly new.
When we went to the Peshawar, we were growing beards,
things like that just to blend in,
which I had Barbar take me to the store
and we bought some traditional clothing there.
Because Peshawar like I said,
it's up near the pass into Afghanistan.
It can be a little sketchy up there,
but our work at that site was maybe 100 yards
from the road where the gate was to get in and all that.
So on a casual glance and I was
going to see somebody wearing that,
you get up closer, you watch me, it is quite obvious.
I'm not Pakistani,
but it's humorous to here I am trying to look like them
and the gentleman on
the drilling company that was working for us,
was wearing all the western clothes
but anyhow in Peshawar,
we were looking at that Pearl Continental Hotel there.
State Department was looking
to convert that hotel into a consulate up
there in Peshawar because their other one had
been repeatedly attacked and wasn't very safe.
We spent another week there in Peshawar and you can see
the doorman at Peshawar and a lot of good times there.
This is towards the end of the time in the Peshawar and
that was our last borehole
right at the front of the building.
You can see that they're drilling rigs,
aren't what we have here in the states.
I'll show a slide and a little bit that shows a lot of
different types of drilling I've seen overseas.
That was last borehole.
We're excited, it was four months.
I was getting ready to head home.
If you look in the background there,
you see there's dark windows.
Inside those dark windows, there's a bunch of shops.
At night, I was down in
their shops drinking tea with shop owners,
buying little trinkets from them,
and just who wants to sit in a hotel room at night?
So you just try to make
the best out of wherever you are,
to put sacrifice into perspective.
It was about a week after we left,
somebody drove onto the compound with a truck full
of explosives and blew that hotel up.
Some of the shop owners were killed.
That doorman was killed,
the manager we were dealing with.
When we talk about the sacrifices we have to
make in going overseas and relocating,
you don't need to make those type of sacrifices.
Just something to put sacrifice into perspective.
Relationships; I can't
stress how important relationships are,
and you guys embark on your careers.
Getting to know people,
getting to know cultures.
Even in the United States,
we have a lot of different subcultures
that play here in the United States.
But the relationships you have with folks,
internal to your firm,
with your clients, with your colleagues,
all of these are really important
as you embark on your career.
What you see in the photo,
there is a relationship I established.
That was that same Phnom Penh trip that was in 2002.
It was a crazy trip to Phnom Penh.
We had a layover in Hong Kong.
We had hotel rooms, although we didn't stay in them.
That was taken up at the top of Victoria Peak.
The gentleman in the middle, I'm on the far right,
currently he's now a senior partner
in his architectural firm and we developed
a relationship on that Phnom Penh trick
that's lasted through today.
The importance of that relationship,
or putting that relationship
and the importance into perspective,
is the picture at the bottom is
a site that we had in the Middle East.
We actually had Dr.
Green help us a little bit on this site.
But when we were getting close to construction,
the contractor was acquiring materials, things like that.
There was a peer review done on
the design of the building
and some of the seismic parameters,
and building and there
was a pretty significant difference
of opinion in the seismic parameters.
I won't say who won,
but basically the building ended up getting
a pretty significant redesign as a result
of the adjustment to the seismic parameters.
He was the gentleman from
Hong Kong in the picture above, he was our client.
He basically supported us during that,
he didn't charge us any redesign fees.
The structural engineer was not in the picture.
He was also somebody
that would come to a lot of meetings,
have gotten to know him over time.
He come to a meeting after the meeting was over,
I'd ask him which airport I needed to drop
him off at because he was always flying back up to
New York and it was [inaudible].
I was always had my fingers
crossed for National because we're in DC.
But in many case,
he didn't charge us any redesign either.
He put a significant amount of redesign into
that structural system of the building.
That's just an example where
having those relationships can
really save you a lot
of time and they'll continue to support you.
[NOISE] This is a little bit of a story.
I'm going to tell you a lot of stories here today,
but this was in Kabul,
Afghanistan in 2009 as well.
I was there at the site, doing an investigation.
We were putting a very
significant additions onto this compound.
This compound is literally got housing, commissary,
everything imaginable on there and they were
adding couple of large office building.
We're going to put in one of the office
building secant pile wall
that was part of the permanent basement structure,
but that's a different story.
What you see there, that's a stock photo,
we can't get photos, we can not be allowed to
take photos of the embassy.
That is the embassy,
but they do not allow us to take them.
They're worried about the cameras that you could
clearly see on the top and
some of the other communication
features that you could clearly see but,
obviously the internet has the photos
so you can just go to the internet and get the photos.
But what you see there is a little bit of
a party going on and that's what a lot of
diplomacy is about and
a lot of these embassy sites we worked on
and they're very good at
throwing parties over these embassies.
How that relates to us is while I was there,
they basically told us they were getting ready to
have a party and they needed us to stop drilling.
I had three drilling crews on site and it's
about a dozen local Afghanis
that we're running these cruise so,
we agreed and said, "All right, we'll stop," and
you know its about lunch and we were
basically sitting on the periphery
of this party and we ate
lunch and we watched the party ourselves.
As this party was progressing,
let me back up a second and let you know that first off,
drillers in Afghanistan are very much like
drillers here and drillers
in a lot of places around the world.
They're rough and burly person.
They're doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world
and they're pretty rough
and there's not a lot
of political correctness about them.
But in any case,
we were sitting there watching this party and this party
was basically celebrating some of the Afghani culture.
They had a lot of local Afghanis there at this party,
they had kids that were flying kites and they had some of
the women doing these traditional Afghani dances.
When you talk about the power of culture here,
I looked over at all these drillers,
there wasn't a dry eye amongst these dozen drillers.
They were all longing for
the Afghanistan they used to know.
They've been occupied and they've had a tough history,
but that's just an attestment to the power of culture.
Next theme I'll talk about is being flexible
and embracing ambiguity and be an agile in the face.
Nothing like COVID is
an example of how you need to be flexible.
When you're working overseas,
or you're working on any job,
you have to realize that not
everything is going to be exactly the way you read
in the book and you're going to need to make
some adjustments on the fly and rely on your judgment.
There's many aside I went to overseas
where holding that soil sample
in my hand and sticking
my thumbnail into it meant a lot more than blow counts.
If you've ever sat on the drill rig you
know what's involved in getting a blow count
but judgment is the most important thing
and Virginia Tech used to teach that.
I'm pretty sure they still do.
They teach JET, judgment first,
experience, and theory.
Always take that with you in
your career and recognize that.
What you see there is in Kiev, Ukraine.
That was a place where maybe I
had to demonstrate a little flexibility.
The day before,
I had laid out
all these boring locations
and I was putting rocks because I had made mistakes.
I thought I was being smart and
adapting to change and it snowed about
a foot that night and
I couldn't find a single one of those rocks and I was out
there laying them all out again and
this guy is lighting the back
of the rig on fire to try to
unfreeze it and I'm huddled over the exhaust
because breathing in exhaust is much more
appealing to me than freezing to death.
Yeah, it's one of the coldest I've ever been.
But you can see from these photos,
there's a lot of different ways folks drill
and you've got to work with what you have then,
like I said, use your judgment.
The bottom left, it was in Kathmandu
and basically they were
trying to hand drill drilled shafts.
They were 24 inch in diameter.
They were spinning this big bucket just
by my hand and I'll explain that a little bit more later.
The upper right, another VDOT
project that was in Mali and there was just a lot of
people there and just getting in the way of drilling
and inserting their own opinions.
You've got some tradition.
Typical A-Frame type things
you see in a lot of countries.
One of them is Romania.
In the bottom two right photos,
you can see that was a in Phnom Penh,
that first job I went on,
they were pushing piles.
That big rig you see there's not a load test,
that was rig they used to push piles into
that subsurface material and
they would walk that rig all over the site.
It didn't work very well but,
the bottom picture is the
actual piles they're putting in and
you'll never see a prettier pile
then that bottom right picture.
That's some serious calligraphy going on
and labeling of that pile.
When you talk about drilling itself in all of this,
what are the two things necessary to drill?
Allen I can call on you, right?
It's me.
All right. How about downward force?
We could do that one.
Crowd. You got torque.
There's no better picture to give a good example of
crowd and torque than this one in Zimbabwe,
where you can see here a crowd of
people sitting up on the drill stem
and crowd of people spin in that drill stem around.
A lot of fun stuff you see overseas.
The data came out good, the project came out
good. It's always interesting.
Those were some very happy folks on that drill rig.
Next thing is we all make mistakes,
everybody is going to make mistakes in
your career and you've got to move on and we
got to learn from them
but make sure you don't repeat them.
What you can see there in
the photo was the mistake I
made in that same Cambodia job.
I'll talk a lot about that job
because it was the first one I
did and I had a lot of interesting things happen to
me just because it was one of the first
times I've been overseas,
but I moved to test pit
on that job site and I didn't check any of
the utility drawings or anything like that
and now he's digging
in there and then next thing you know,
there's this big flash of light,
a big frame fires out of the backhoe bucket and behold,
he hit this big utility line.
This utility line, you can't tell by the picture but it
was a good five inches in diameter.
That was on the morning,
that was first thing in the morning.
They spent the entire day splicing that power line that
knocked out power too many city blocks
in downtown Phnom Penh,
place that if you're relying
on air conditioning, that's not a good thing.
It's a very hot location.
But near this place was some big oilfield bag
and the electrical line was inside that and it was crazy.
The next day I came down to breakfast
and noticed that client,
not the gentleman that you saw in Hong Kong,
but his client contractor
who had designed build project,
he was sitting there reading the newspaper at breakfast,
so I went and got my breakfast and went
over and sat down and
he didn't even look up and say a word to me.
He has got his reading glasses on like I
wear these days and he's reading the paper,
not even looking up at me and
so I started talking to him.
I said, "You know Peter, I hit that line yesterday,
I feel really bad about it",
and he looks up in the paper and he goes,
"You know I got a bill shoved under
my door last night on that utility line".
Then he burst out laughing and he said it
was $300 and I paid in cash.
[LAUGHTER] I dodged the bullet.
I learned a cheap lesson there,
but could you imagine if you knocked out power in
Washington DC or even Virginia Tech.
Not right now, it's very surreal here right now,
what's going on with COVID but, in any case,
I got off scot-free
but learn from all those others mistakes.
Try not to commit the same mistakes.
Utility strike, that's something
that's always going to happen.
You want to try to be forgiving
when they happen to others.
These are a couple of examples
of some utility strikes that shovel handle,
both of these were within a year of each other.
You see that bottom left picture,
that drilling rig obviously,
it's not the Beverly Hills but it is at
that drilling rig hit a chilled waterline,
the facility right up above it.
It hit a chilled waterline for Pentagon.
I was told that chilled waterline was for
the server room and in
any case, that thing was shooting,
the guys were up and higher than that at one in time,
middle winter, chilled water,
rocks coming up from the excavation,
waters turn into ice falling down in chunks,
damaged vehicles, we ended up paying
for that pretty significantly.
The other one is US Naval Academy.
We hit powerline there and ended up,
not only did we pay for the fix everyday,
but they took it on themselves to fix
several a 100 feet of electrical lines,
so they got a little bit better.
We paid for that as well.
The reason we pay for some of these things is supported
by the graph down below.
In your career,
you've got to be aware of what's important.
Is your relationship with your client important or
is the outcome of
what you're trying to accomplish important?
That's going to dictate how you negotiate.
Whether you're passive, because you know
the outcome is not important
and the relationship is not important.
Both of those, the relationship was very
important so basically we were very accommodating.
We paid to have those things fixed.
They were good clients of ours,
obviously high profile projects,
and we saw the benefit
in paying to have those things fixed.
Moving on then. Work hard and get dirty.
Don't be afraid to take on
any task even as you get your degree.
Get out in the field, turn a hand dog
or do things like that. People will notice when you're
out there doing the things,
that you want to work smart as well.
Really have anything to say about that photo there.
It's just one of the Phnom Penh Photos,
even if it's dirty, so I included it.
But one of the things I will mention,
you can see a quote here and I
will go over all the quotes
I put on these but I first heard
that quote when I was at a DBIA conference and
the actual speaker was Joe Theismann, anyone know who
Joe Theismann is younger folks know, Joe Theismann is?
He was a quarterback for Washington.
I will say their name there now, the football team,
but he won a Super Bowl then he was injured
when Lawrence Taylor sacked
and that was the end of his career.
That's on the movie
The Blind Side and all that good stuff.
But Joe Theismann was speaking and he said that,
I'm speaking to everyone out there.
I want you to keep in mind as you start your careers,
the first eight hours a day he work is for survival.
Anything beyond that is an investment in your future.
Keep that in mind. People do
notice when you put in that extra time.
Like I said, your work smart.
That's an interesting excavation.
I don't think anyone in this room will probably
ever seen one like that in their career.
That was in Quito, Ecuador
and it was in some tough soil, volcanic tough.
We definitely would stand up and they basically,
carved stairs into that excavation,
top them off of with concrete.
That priceless, I don't know.
I guess if they didn't have anything else to work on
and they were just trying to
keep busy then I'll say it is.
The upper right picture is
another example of worker maybe not working smart,
and we always want to make sure that projects were on.
We have supportive excavation.
We prefer that supportive of
excavation to be where the people are there.
There's no support of excavation where
the people are in that excavation so be careful.
Last photo on the bottom rights in Ethiopia Addis Ababa.
Yeah, that's a big crawler crane on a,
on a rail system and you can see there's
a pretty significant excavation to
the right there and made a lot of us very nervous.
We worked with the contractor to help
them figure out ways to buttress that and work around it.
The fortunate thing was there was some columnar basalt.
It's just for understanding,
vertical right underneath it.
It had that in essence,
it had some piles underneath it
and they were lucky in that respect.
Be smart when you're out there.
Be decisive, help others to make decisions.
As you are starting you have
to be measured and get others
involved until your experience
catches up with you and make sure
you don't overstep boundaries.
But be ready to step up, make decisions.
You're going to need to actually get
movement in your career
and pay attention to
what happens after you make a decision.
When you move forward in a certain direction,
because it may not always be as you anticipate,
you might need to make another decision real
quick to offset that.
You probably wonder what that photo is
and an example of me making
a very poor decision
that photo was in Cotonou Benin I think in 2013.
We were working out on a job site
there and I came back to the hotel.
Superintendent for the contractor
was staying at that hotel.
We were out there in that pool
taking a swim right after work
and he was trying to get
me to invest in an investment when I was in that pool,
it was like $50 a share and it's called Bitcoin.
I did not invest in Bitcoin time
and I'm kicking myself today and in that day
goes by where I don't see Bitcoin I gets above
$15,000 now and it's certainly volatile,
but that's never going to go down to $50 again.
[LAUGHTER] That's an example of me making a bad decision.
That's one of the most painful photos in
this slide deck for me.
Well, we did help a lot of
contractors make some good decisions.
Both of these are the same contractor and we always
look for foundation options for them.
It's when you're working overseas you're at
the mercy of what technology
is in place in those countries.
If you can import technology
and improve foundation sub-grade that
goes along way on those things because
the foundations are the critical path on this projects.
We talked to them about the other one on
the left is Kiev in Ukraine.
We brought on a two-pair rig from Germany
to improve the foundation sub-grade if you put
shallow foundations and one on the right is we brought in
the Vibrio compactor and it's in fiber compaction of
the loose sandy soils at the Cotonou Benin project.
Both of those saved them a lot of money.
We did certainly rattle a couple buildings nearby,
especially with the Vibrio compactor.
They had to pay to fix a few houses,
but definitely the cost savings
was much more significant.
Put yourself out there, this is important for
a lot of us and better engineers.
I suspect, like me,
some of you are introverts.
I'm a massive introvert and
I don't like it and I'm talking in front of people.
COVID is like engineers' Utopia.
You don't have to be in contact with
people and work from home, work by yourself,
but you do have to get out there and you got
to step outside yourself and you've got to be personal.
That sense very important as
you're embarking on your career,
this soft skill things will take you a
long way as you move forward in your career.
Can be exhausting, putting on the act
and being out there, but certainly rewarding.
Then like I said, you want to let
your experiences change the way
you are, how you do things.
The other one that photo there
is Johannesburg, South Africa.
It's not really a introvert type picture out there thing,
but we were there.
We put it in 30 to 60 inch diameter drilled
shafts for the embassy
there and they were going to extend,
think I extended down by 50, 60 feet.
You can see the A-Frame there
where they lower folks into the hole, this vacuum.
They still do some downhole inspections there.
I wish I still did them here,
but I think that's a thing
of the past here in the states.
You can see the drill rig,
see some tape, but don't you see in the picture.
Casing, no casing in any of these holes.
Going down, that was probably one of
the silliest things I ever did in my career is
going down and case hole 5060 feet.
The only redeeming thing was it was
about three guys down
the bottom hole cleaning it out for two hours,
at least before I went down
there but be careful out there.
But like I said,
culture is certainly something
that you will encounter as you go in your careers,
particularly if you go overseas.
Famous quote, culture is
a strategy for breakfast, so don't fight it.
That upper right picture is in Kathmandu.
Paul that was where they were drilling those hand drill,
drill chess and I
didn't get into why they were doing that.
You see a lot of things in a picture.
You can see a drilled shaft, some drilled shaft,
rig in the background, you see a load test
going on underneath that blue tarp.
There's a bunch of rebar draped over load frame.
Then you can also see a precast pile.
There are a lot of stuff going on in that picture about
the project driven pile project.
We started driving piles and it scared the hell out
of everybody that live
within vibration distance of that site.
We ended up getting shut down and the contractors,
as we're going to hand drill these shafts.
Eventually we worked it out that we could go
and drive piles and we went and did
some pre-condition surveys because
anytime you're creating vibrations,
any crack it's gotten somebody's house,
you didn't notice it, you didn't
know that before it's caused by you.
Just keep that in mind as you move forward.
We were able to drive the miles Autumn rate is in 2006.
It's not a weekend,
I can tell you that's not a holiday.
It's a sunny day, middle of the day, nobody on site.
What happened that was the day and
they left right forward happen there's a solar eclipse.
We are not working through this thing
we're going to add here.
They all left the site and I stayed around,
kicked dirt for a while now.
[MUSIC] You can't control these things.
Then the bottom left, that was one of
our sites and Malta.
[MUSIC] Somebody come on that site,
strip all the soil out and tried to find out who did that
because it's pretty rare in malted, its weight in gold.
But as they stripped it, they
encountered a lot of
interesting things and what you see there,
it happens to be filled with water
and old burial chamber.
The embassy basically tried
to incorporate some of these things.
I think they end up putting
plexiglass and over and there was
a few others like that as well and some Roman sister.
He said I can hit where that happens in the States to,
you work in some of these older cities
and you start doing boring or something and
you get a piece of an old ship or
something in your project shuts down.
Keep in mind that culture is very
important as you work in different places.
The other thing I'll say is, study people,
all people aren't the same.
You can see from this photo going on,
none of these people were remotely similar.
I will say the top rights and Kathmandu
and this looks high priests or wherever they are.
But those guys were the biggest jokesters out there,
I've ever seen in my life.
You can't tell from the photo.
[MUSIC] Running around and grabbing people,
pulling their hair and laughing.
Basically everybody's got different things,
different things motivate different people,
so be a student of people and how they behave.
One thing, one of the classes that
I took that was helpful to me a little bit long,
but it's helpful as an ASE lead course
and that brought to light,
different things that motivate people.
Some people when they make decisions,
they're going to get motivated.
it's all dependent on
how their decision might impact people.
Some people, before they make a decision,
they like to analyze every piece of data.
A lot of engineers falls into that category.
Some people are just instinctual,
make decisions like that may not be the right one,
but we'll make another one like that and change
course and maybe a quick path to the outcome,
but it might be a zigzag.
Then there was another group in that class
with an old like to make decisions.
They'd rather get everybody around and seeing who buy
on a group decision.
But keep in mind that everybody's not like you,
everybody is different,
different people get motivated by different things.
Understand the people you're working
with and tell
all these people are a little bit different.
They all work with us.
These overseas countries and getting
them on target and moving towards
our common goal of finishing
the project require different levels of class.
[NOISE] Of course, you can't talk about
things you have without talking
about luck and circumstances.
It does play a role, you can't control it,
can't predict, it, can't count on it.
I was fortunate in my career.
I was pretty much blessed
with very good bosses my entire career.
I had very good mentors.
In most places that you might go to,
formal mentoring programs,
some places have, some don't.
There's different philosophies on
whether they work or not.
But I do encourage you all to find mentors,
and recognizing your mentors
throughout your career may change
in time with what your needs are, what your goals are.
But it is very important to be able to bounce
ideas off focusing talked effects,
and find out how they made it through
a tough situation and things like that.
I encourage you to seek that out.
I'm not sure if this is luck or not.
Just this picture makes me a little scary.
This was also in Malta,
and it's a building with
strip footing along the edge of it,
and that excavation is just right up against this.
It's not one of our jobs.
I don't think it ever fell in.
But I feel more comfortable with you.
A few kind of anchors,
tie backs, whatever in there. What do you think of it?
Something just to solidify that big block.
I did encounter some luck throughout my career.
I'll give you a few examples.
The Hong Kong picture that I've
cropped for this one just for size,
but that was in 2002,
few months after that,
SARS came through Hong Kong.
The upper right picture,
was my favorite, 2006.
Couple of months after that.
Basically, they started another war,
and Hezbollah there was all bombings going on.
I miss those things. I miss the bombing at the Pearl.
The one below is in Sanaa Yemen.
Yemen is definitely a little bit
of a hotspot in the world.
We were there in 2014,
and we were there and working down on this site,
and it's across the street from the embassy.
We were converting a shared hotel into lodging quarters
for a lot of their TTY folks that came in to visit.
One day we were down there bottom of the site and
there erupted a huge gun battle out there in the street.
On the other side of the wall, the wall was as
tall as this wall here.
But we were definitely a little nervous inside,
was a little brought to mind,
Winston Churchill clip, which is
nothing more exhilarating being shot at, and missed.
I've certainly had a lot of luck in
my career and I have been fortunate.
I think this is one of
the last pieces of advice I'll share,
and I think I'm probably doing fairly well on time,
and that's just be patient, enjoy the ride.
Things don't happen immediately.
You're not going to be the boss in
your second year of working.
Things may seem like they're going slow,
but when you stop
down the road and you look back on your career,
you're going to wonder where all the time went.
Enjoy every day, enjoy each experience you have.
They're all fun, they're all moldy and make you better.
This picture is in Mumbai, India.
We're doing a load test on
a real chaff that we put in there in the monsoon season.
I think it's a 24-hour test,
and we definitely required a significant amount of
patience to load that up.
These are a bunch of other projects we've done.
On the upper left is Karachi,
Pakistan big load frame for a load test on a pile there.
No load test going on.
Sometimes you just got to be patient
and let things work their course.
Bottom left is in Abuja, Nigeria.
The contractor had built a special little shoot for
the local farmers to run their cattle through once a day.
Interesting things.
Then the right is, again, back in Kabul.
We encountered some negative production days in Kabul.
That means the holes were collapsing and
we were ending above where we started.
That was very frustrating,
required a lot of patience.
But also in some of these sites,
you don't want to go too fast
because you can encounter things.
Those are spent shells down there,
but we did encounter a live shell in Erbil Iraq.
Definitely don't want to
move too fast in some of the things.
[NOISE] I guess basically to wrap it up,
like I said, volunteer for these hard assignments.
There's no easy path as you move through your career.
Make sacrifices and work hard.
People are going to notice the extra time you put in.
Demonstrate flexibility and agility.
There's nothing more pressing
now than agility and flexibility in COVID.
Hopefully, the same will be over sometime in
2021, but who knows?
We've all had to be flexible.
Just looking around campus, you can see that.
Being here and always wear mask,
measured six feet apart and all that.
Be accepting of that.
Relationships. Don't forget about relationships.
They're super important as you
work your way through your career.
I can tell you I wouldn't be where I was today
had I not made a lot of the relationships,
even kept relationships with
former employees and employers.
Then, let yourself be impacted by your experiences.
Don't rush it and enjoy life.
Now, that picture there is
not there just because it's a nice, serene picture.
If you'll indulge me one more story,
I'll give you one more story.
Again, Phnom Penh.
I started on Phnom Penh.
I'll finish on Phnom Penh,
but that was the Raffles Hotel in Cambodia.
We've just gone through long torturers.
It was like a 44-hour trip to get there,
flying coach and crammed in.
Bunch of sardines,
stopped at Hong Kong,
had hotel rooms but never slept.
I arrived there like 3:00 a.m. in the morning,
and I was dead tired.
I checked into the hotel.
They're all smiles and happy again,
and gave me a drink in
some like elephant ceramic mug or something like that.
I checked in and went up to my room,
and it was very similar to that one up on
that top floor that's been partially cropped.
If that's not the room,
it very well could be the room,
and went in, closed my door.
Been a long day,
so I took off my dress shirt,
took off my dress pants and I went out on them.
Said I'm going to sit on the balcony
and enjoy this little elephant drink.
I walk out the balcony and I close the door behind me,
and I here a loud click.
I say, "Oh my gosh,
I hope that's not what I think it is."
I turned around and sure enough, that door's locked.
I said, well, this drink's not going to
last me until daylight.
What I'm going to do here. I'm on that top balcony,
looking over at the balcony next to him.
I said, you know what, I think I can jump that.
Getting ready to get up on the legend,
and I thought to myself, what am
I going to do when I get there?
I say there's two outcomes.
One, that nobody in that room
either and that door is locked.
Or two, there is somebody there,
and here I am in my underwear.
I'm not jumping across that balcony.
Eventually, I sat down and started
enjoying my drink and being patient,
and behold, about 20 minutes later I see
somebody out by the pool, the gardener.
He's out there, and I start shouting,
wave my hands in,
I'll start pulling on the door.
He didn't speak any English.
I pull on the door and he finally got it.
I said all right, finally.
I sat down, enjoy a little more of
my elephant drink, and I'm watching.
Now, I'm not looking at pool,
and turn around looking into the bedroom,
waiting for the inevitable,
and then about 15 minutes later it happens.
I see the door start to open,
and there's little U-shaped bolts
that you put on the door well, they work.
It opened about that much,
and then I see the door
close and I starts sipping my drink again.
About 15 minutes later,
I see the door push open again,
and I see this hack saw cutting through this bolt.
Then, eventually comes in looking
at me funny lets me in,
that's essentially the end of the story.
You have the moral there is
not to get caught with your pants down.
I guess that could be a good moral.
But the moral is,
don't let doors close behind you.
That's a metaphor.
You guys are going to have many employers in your career.
When you leave one employer and go to the next,
keep your relationships at those last ones.
I kept a lot of relationships.
In fact, we've got a lot of work
with them as a result of that.
It's important. We're all in a very tight,
close knit community,
and a lot of people know a lot of people.
It's very important as you make changes
in your career that you keep
those doors open behind you,
and keep your relationships that
you've worked hard to build, fresh and alive.
I've done a lot of talking.
I don't know if I've gone over or not.
I hope you've managed to take away something from this.
I do appreciate, again,
the opportunity to be here,
and I wish you all the best of luck on your career.
It's going to be interesting. Be ready for change.
You guys are going to see change at a pace
faster than any of us else in this room have seen.
I think with that,
I'm going to turn it over,
see if we have any questions.
I'm happy to answer questions.
Again, it wasn't highly technical,
so I don't expect to getting technical questions.
If I get any, I'll pass them on to Allan.
[APPLAUSE] Thank you.
Thank you all.
I think your comment about
relationships is above the mark.
I think the relationship would
see DPR and bringing it back
is a great thing for my career and for Schnabel.
We're going to continue this.
Dr. Adrian, do we have any questions?
Is there any questions online you can either type to me.
[OVERLAPPING] You got an echo.
If anyone has any questions,
feel free to type them up
and send them in or submit them.
You did your bachelors and your masters here
and got the technical experience and
now you are in the business aspect.
Was there any formal training in the business or is
that learning part of the job and how is that transition?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Myself, like many CEOs in our industry,
I have a technical degree and
I manage projects and things like that.
But was there any formal training in
things for management roles
and things like that? An accurate statement.
Some of the management comes from project management,
but at Schnabel we did have
some leadership development activities. It went on.
We currently have the succession planning that goes on.
We're looking at who might be the next CEO,
who might be the next Business Unit President,
who might be the next Business
Development Director, etc.
So many leadership role.
They're identifying who those potential candidates are.
We do try to put them into
activities to help get them prepared for that.
Some folks we've sent to Wharton for
strategy courses, things like that.
I didn't have somethings, I went through next degree,
and I went through a whole development process
for many years prior to taking over.
[BACKGROUND] I think a lot of companies are like that.
As you're interviewing them, you can ask them what
kind of soft skill training, that's important too.
How PDH and things like that,
that we do need to develop soft skills
and make sure that we have
those. Questions today or?
No, there are no questions.
From Mina:
You presented a lot of international projects.
Can you comment on your opinion on the importance of
international components in engineering education?
Well, I cannot speak to
international design codes, things like that.
All the projects that we've worked on
overseas had been State Department related.
They'd been for [inaudible]
who goes out and builds our embassies.
They follow IBC specifically.
That usually is pretty
well encapsulates most other building codes.
We do get into
some interesting scenarios in some of these countries,
because we do technically have to
abide by what their design codes are.
I think that impacts the structural engineers on
this projects much more than it
does us and maybe even some of the civils.
I'm not sure if that answers
your question, but generally,
we're following ourselves at Schnabel.
We're following US companies in working
on US projects technically on US soil,
being an embassy or consulate site.
I have a question. [inaudible].
Working on what?
Working on the hard basalt.
Well, we didn't hit any of the hard basalt in Mumbai.
We had deep foundations.
I don't recall actually.
That was in 2005, I believe,
so I don't recall what the base of this was on.
But it was all pretty loose materials.
That's why we had deep foundations.
But I did enjoy Mumbai,
I spoke about that at lunch.
It was very interesting.
I need to go back to India because
I was there in monsoon.
I think that it certainly impacted my experience.
Any other question?
[inaudible] What was your most
challenging project and why?
[NOISE] Challenging, frustrating. I'm not sure.
Frustrating, it was actually
a small little project in Leesburg, Virginia.
They were building a car wash and it was on a landfill.
It was extremely frustrating.
We were dealing with a contractor who didn't
want to take out all this landfill material.
His rental guide underbid it.
Right before I went into a meeting with him,
he was talking about how he
just bought some big farm out in Purcellville.
Then in the meeting he starts talking and says,
"What if we find a farm to take all this trash to? "
I said we use [inaudible] we must take it to your farm.
[LAUGHTER] But he didn't like that idea.
Not in my backyard.
We've had a lot of challenging projects.
Beirut was a very challenging project.
They moved it from the site when I was
investigating with the solar eclipse.
That was right on
the edge of the Hezbollah region up in Bagda.
They moved it up north of the city,
to another location, but it's built up into a hillside.
It was very challenging project,
and a very complex design.
A lot of issues.
Working overseas, a lot of
projects are challenging because
every time you go somewhere,
you're a new geology.
I could do a whole presentation on challenging
sites and none really stand out.
There's challenges with logistics,
getting things into some of these countries
that are not very
well-developed and don't have technology.
Cheap labor is the enemy of technology.
Now when you've got cheap labor and it's
easier to hand drill a shaft,
then you put the drill rig,
then they're going to do that.
[APPLAUSE].
Good work, thank you. Thank you everyone.
Thank you everybody. We look
forward to seeing you again next year.
I'm going to stop this.
Perfect. Great. [OVERLAPPING]