Many years ago, rookie baseball
umpire Durwood Merrill found himself behind the plate
for a game when legendary fastball pitcher Nolan Ryan
was on the mound. The second pitch of the game was so
fast that Merrill never saw it. He froze, unable to make
the call. Finally, he yelled, "Strike!" The
batter then backed out of the box, looked over at
Merrill and said, "Ump, don’t feel bad, I didn’t
see the ball either!"
You know, the whole world is like
that today. Change is happening so fast that none of us
can see its impacts clearly. Yet all of us—inspectors,
code officials, plan reviewers, businessmen,
researchers, sales people, installers—all of us still
have to do an essential job every day as we pass through
a period of unprecedented change of a magnitude and on a
scale the world has not seen before.
As each of you experience on a daily
basis, we are living in a world of great expectations
and great potential opportunity, where speed, agility
and the ability to change and adapt rapidly are
absolutely essential to success. It is a world in which
survival is by no means assured, where the prize will go
to the quickest and the smartest, or to those who
persevere the hardest.
We, my friends, are living in a world
in which your current practices and policies, developed
with the greatest of care yesterday, can be outdated or
not even apply tomorrow. We share a world where
yesterday’s research and numerous code provisions and
standards may no longer apply to all of the new
constructions and systems of today.
I am reminded of a bush pilot who
landed at a mountain airstrip to pick up a hunter who
had been camping for a week. The hunter had bagged two
moose and he insisted that he wanted to take both of
them with him.
"I can’t do that," the
pilot told him. "With you, your gear and both
moose, the plane won’t clear that mountain; it’ll be
far too heavy."
The hunter insisted, "I shot two
moose last year and the pilot put both of them on the
plane." So, they loaded both moose and took off.
Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, they didn’t
make it; the plane crashed into the mountainside. No one
was injured, and the pilot stumbled from the wreckage
and looked around, asking, "Where are we?"
The hunter looked around and said,
"We’re about a mile further than we were last
year."
The development of new methods, new
products and systems, the changes brought about by
continuing innovation and new business procedures are
like that. We cannot let past failures frighten us. We
might crash a few times, but with each attempt we get a
little further, we do a little better, and eventually we
get over the mountain.
Many great events of the past—like
the collapse of communism, man walking on the moon,
NAFTA, and continuing improvements in construction
technology—have all combined to help change the world.
As a result, for the first time in memory, almost every
country on the planet has a market-oriented economic
system, and they are all attempting to be players in the
global marketplace for goods, technology, services, and
capital.
Many of us remember that just before
the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989),
according to the Hoover Analysis, "Almost 70
percent of mankind was living under Marxist and
Socialist economic systems, which greatly inhibited
trade, research and investment. But then came the great
changes of the decade, and suddenly there were about
three billion more people in the capitalist
system."
Stop and think about that. In the
past few decades, a whole new world has been born—a
world that is helping to fuel the need for better and
more flexible responses to the demand for new products,
revised products, improved methods and systems created
by the more sophisticated buildings and structures and
infrastructures that we build and occupy today. The
demand to supply safe, quality materials and better
systems never seems to stop. You see that in the
constant essential changes that occur in the electrical
codes with which many of you work (although I am not so
sure all the things that we change and tinker with
always need radical treatment!). It is a global need
that fuels the demand for these changes.
So, the process of change is ongoing
and continuous throughout all of our businesses—and it
must be so for us to compete in this competitive and
continually changing world.
Leaders in Technology
As business people, engineers,
designers, sales people and inspectors, competing in
this great new fractured world of endless possibilities,
we are out on the cutting edge of competition and we’ve
got the ultimate weapon—the very best technology in
the world.
This in no way means that we do not
need new ideas. We not only need them, but we need better ideas, and we need to develop them faster. We need to
executive them faster. That is central to what we should
be about: the ongoing and never-ending efforts to do
what we do more efficiently, more creatively, and more
safely.
It has been my good fortune to be a
part of the construction industry and our regulatory
system for over 40 years, and I have learned that the
demands for research and new methods and systems
frequently are more severe, and they occur more rapidly
than we can generally anticipate. So to be sure, there
will probably be more demands and more unique changes to
which we all must respond as the 21st century
now unfolds—more than we, individually or
collectively, can anticipate or imagine.
During my last 34 years at the Reedy
Creek Improvement District, one of my primary
responsibilities was to consider and respond to the
constant need for new products and systems that would
assist Walt Disney World as it continued to develop new
attractions, resorts, and infrastructures. As a unique
local government providing services ranging from
communications to fire service to roads to electrical
power to building inspections and environmental
services, we were and still are in the process of
dealing with change. Those concerns have ranged from the
appropriate use of various cables in plenum spaces and
overhead ceiling and concealed spaces, to fire
resistivity of cables, to limitations on the
accumulation of cables in buildings—all areas where
there are no fixed, guaranteed regulations that are not
subject to change by the prevailing authority having
jurisdiction. These simple examples of the types of
change that affect us all are but a drop in the bucket
to what you deal with every day. It seems, and quite
appropriately so, that industry is always introducing
and testing new technology—and that is as it should
be!
You must also deal with software
changes, marketing changes, regulations, driving
environmental issues, personnel management changes, and
especially the pressures, both private and public, to
produce our work-product "faster–better–cheaper."
That’s not new, but it is more pronounced now than
ever before. These are not unbearable burdens, just
typical of the issues that we will all deal with sooner
or later. The question is, "How will we handle the
challenges of this century, like bad tasting medicine or
like an invigorating tonic?"
Change Is Inevitable
I’m sure that we all remember the
visions we had as kids when we pictured the 21st century as a time when we’d strap on our jet backpacks
and zoom into the sky to get to work or to meet friends
for lunch, or we pictured ourselves working in a place
so filled with flashing lights and technology that we’d
simply push buttons and twist dials all day. Now that
may happen, we’ve got 97 years to get it done, but in
the meantime we’ve got to respond to the needs of the
real world as it exists and changes.
Let’s consider the options
available to us as we respond to the changes we will
face. We can cope with change, adapt to
change, or exploit change, or we can actually create change…on purpose.
There are people who think of change
in terms of just coping with the situation. They respond
with a victim mentality. Their common reactions to the
need for change are pessimism, or the attitude to
"just hang on…someone else will take care of
everything. Those people talk about how hard things are,
and why they cannot make things work. They believe the
demand for change will pass and if they wait long enough
things will return to "normal." Well, I’m
here to tell them that things are moving ahead, and that
things in this decade will never be normal, as we’ve
come to recognize them.
A backwoods farmer, sitting on the
steps of his tumbledown shack, was approached by a
stranger who stopped for a drink of water. "How’s
your wheat coming along?" asked the stranger.
"Didn’t plant none."
"Really?" I thought this
was good wheat country."
"Afraid it wouldn’t rain
enough."
"Oh, well, how’s the corn
crop?"
"Ain’t got none," said
the farmer.
"Didn’t you plant any corn
either?" "Nope, ‘fraid of corn blight."
"For heaven’s sake," said
the stranger, "What did you plant?"
"Nothin’," said the
farmer, "I just played it safe."
I suggest to you that we cannot
afford to play it safe. We must keep on finding new and
better ways, new and better codes and more efficient
methods.
Another group of people display an adjustment
mentality. They don’t like the change that is
occurring, but they grudgingly try to accommodate the
changes. They adapt. They just go with the flow.
They aren’t going to make a lot of effort to improve,
do research, or effect any kind of solution; they just
resign themselves to accept the inevitable.
I remember the story of the old
janitor at my church who always seemed to please
everybody. In spite of conflicting needs throughout the
campus, he always seemed to be smiling and going ahead
with his work. One day someone asked him what made him
so successful in pleasing so many bosses and he slowly
leaned on his broom and said, "Well…I just puts
myself in neutral and goes wherever I’m pushed."
Although it seemed to solve his
problems, that method won’t work for you and me. We
cannot afford to be in neutral, but rather we’ve got
to realize that regardless of how far behind the change
curve we are, there is a need to keep on keeping on. A
man stopped to watch a little league baseball game and
as he watched he turned to the youngster closest to him
and asked what the score was.
"We’re behind fifteen to
nothing," was the answer.
"Well," said the man,
"I must say you don’t look discouraged."
"Discouraged?" the boy
said, looking puzzled. "Why should we be
discouraged? We haven’t come to bat yet!"
Friends, you and I continue to get turns at bat, so
there’s no need for discouragement, just room for
encouragement when we remember that there’s always
opportunity to adjust to the changes that are happening
all around us.
And then there are the people who are
interested in exploiting change. They try to turn
it to their advantage. Instead of wasting time and
energy resenting the need for changing the way things
need to be done, or the need for better systems, they
involve themselves in helping search for positive
benefits. Change is not only accepted, but it is
actively embraced as a great opportunity.
Lastly, there’s the proactive category.
Instead of waiting for change to happen, you make it
happen. You’re not content to cope with, adapt to, or
even exploit change—you create it.
During the Battle of the Bulge, one
of the most important battles of World War II, things
did not appear to be going well during the early days.
General Anthony McAuliff assembled his officers for a
pep talk.
"Men," he said, "We
are surrounded by the enemy. We now have the greatest
opportunity ever presented to any army. We can attack in
any direction!" That may sound overly optimistic to
you, but remember—we won the battle. I suggest to you
that a proactive position relating to the evolution of
new products—marketing, installing, designing—and
using these new systems and methods that change has
brought about will lead all of us to more wins than
losses, and save us a lot of headaches.
My mission here today is to remind
all of us that there always has been and there always
will be a demand for continuing change in our world, and
we must go beyond just coping with it, or adapting to
it, or exploiting it—we need to become pioneers of
change. Many of you have done that for years and
that is great, but the rest of you have to adjust. Sure,
there will be some things that won’t work out. You’ll
spend some money that won’t produce a high return, or
perhaps no return at all. But that’s okay so long as
we make only new mistakes. Remember, it is
important that we experiment, explore, and search for
not just the good or the better, but for the best.
Change invites us into the unknown, and it promises new
possibilities and unseen opportunities. We can partner
with the world of tomorrow and thereby make change a
vital part of our lives and our business.
How you can I take our commitment to
change is not nearly as important, however, as how we
finish the job our employers and clients expect us to
do. That’s what matters! We just need to keep on
keeping on! I am regularly reminded of a little poem I
learned as a young boy
(See figure
1).
Together, my friends, we must keep
swimming around, then as change comes, as indeed it
will, we will be ready, not only to benefit, but to
contribute!
Tom Moses retired from Reedy Creek
Improvement District (Walt Disney World) as vice
president of administration in 2002. He became director
of building and safety for the Reedy Creek Improvement
District in May 1969 and developed the Epcot Building
Code and other standards key to the debut of the Magic
Kingdom in 1971. He went onto become district
administrator when General Joe Potter retired in January
1973, and vice president of administration in June 1982.
He is a longtime advocate of public safety and as such,
has served in several voluntary positions, including as
a trustee of the Fire Protection Research Foundation, on
NFPA’s board of directors, and the UL board of
trustees and governing board. He was chair of the first
Florida Board of Building Code and Standards for three
years and a member for seventeen years. In addition, he
was president of the Southern Building Code Congress
International, president of Council of American Building
Officials ,and a member and chair of the National
Institute of Building Sciences
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