Equally important, Larry transformed his leadership style and his career. It was known that if Larry came out of his office and into the field that meant there was a problem and he was going to go fix it. In those days, fixing it meant heads would roll. People feared project managers coming out into the field.

Well, Larry decided that one of the things he needed to do was to get to know the people at his project. So Larry would go out and start talking to the crews and the teams in the field. He had never done that before. He would even invite crews in to have lunch with him.

You could imagine what must have gone through people’s minds when they had an invitation to come up to the administration building and have lunch with the project manager. It was like, “Holy Toledo, what did I do wrong?”

But he really did want to get to know the people. He wanted to hear what their issues and concerns were so he and his team could help address those. Ultimately, (and he was so respected to start with), he was really treating people with care and concern, dignity and respect. Having that culture emerge from one of fear and command and control was just extraordinary. At the end of the project, I recall that organizationally, everybody in that company saw who he had become.

From that moment on, in any meeting that Larry attended when he was going to talk about safety, his peers and others would literally listen with extraordinary intensity because something had changed in this man. He was doing incredible things and it was so different than what people knew of him before.

I think that, actually, in the latter part of his career--I recall talking to him about this--he actually started to have fun. He really enjoyed the work and knew he was making a difference in terms of constructing projects on time and on schedule. But I think what he really got satisfaction out of was seeing projects being constructed without hurting people.

I: Could you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say an entire organization is transformed? Is there an example of a time you’ve actually seen an organization take on some of the level of transformation that Larry saw?

RB: Again, a number of projects have flashed across my memory just as you were asking that question. There are a lot of them that I could choose from, but I think the one that I want to talk about is a Chevron project.

We worked about 12 years ago on a Chevron project in Saudi Arabia.That project had breakthrough safety performance by all major accounts. They took on, they owned and they brought to life Incident and Injury-Free safety.

At the end of that project, the project manager from Chevron went back into Chevron’s project organization--it’s called the Project Resources Company (PRC)--and he took a stand that Chevron could build their capital projects around the world without hurting anyone.

I recall the conversation at that time and the concern was, “Look at where we work in the world: Kazakhstan, Africa, Asia. We just don’t know if that’s possible.” But the project manager was a stand for no one getting hurt anywhere and, ultimately, that leadership team became a stand that they were going to build their projects and not hurt people.

When we did the global diagnostic for them, we talked to the Chevron people, project managers, project professionals and safety professionals and then we went and talked to the major contractors that worked for them on a number of projects. One of the things that we heard was that the contractors did not experience that, at that time, safety was a value for Chevron in terms of their execution of capital projects.

They would say things like, “You have to have a certain level of safety performance to be able to get on the bid list or tender list, but once you are in and once we start executing the work, it’s cost and schedule.” When we put that and many other disturbing findings in front of the leadership team, they really stepped up and they owned it and they started to work on it.

To this day, when you look at Chevron’s capital project safety performance as benchmarked against their peers, in just about every comparison I have seen, they are best in class. And, they are not satisfied with where they are at so they continue to look at what’s next. They have taken on many of their issues and improved their performance and their practices, and developed their managers as leaders and champions for extraordinary safety.

So, that’s an organization that I have seen just transform from one where the priority was, “Execute our projects with excellence in terms of cost, schedule, quality and attainability” to one where “we can safely execute our projects.” That’s one that stands out most to me.