Word: bechtel
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Thinking big was Steve Bechtel's forte. He learned to appreciate scale as the primary manager in the building of Hoover Dam in the early '30s, then the largest public works project in U.S. history. The wartime shipyards Bechtel organized would build 560 vessels--up to 20 ships a month--between 1941 and 1945, an astounding output even in an era of production miracles...
...Bechtel was, and remained throughout his nearly 70-year career, a visionary whose imagination was fired by grandiose projects--the more seemingly impossible the better. His motto, endlessly repeated, was "We'll build anything for anybody, no matter what the location, type or size." He and his company built pipelines and power plants in the forbidding reaches of the Canadian Rockies, across the Arabian desert and through South American jungles, as well as in daunting places like downtown Boston, where the Central Artery project unfolds today. His portfolio even includes an entire city (Jubail, Saudi Arabia). Bechtel built...
...Bechtel grew up on rugged construction sites where his father Warren, who started the company, punched rail lines and highways through the California wilderness. To the end of his long life--he died in 1989, six months short of his 89th birthday--Steve Bechtel enjoyed prowling around job sites, but he neither looked nor sounded like a construction boss. In his prime, in the 1950s, he was trim, well tailored and relatively soft voiced, with the ingratiating manner of a salesman...
...always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade...
...Bechtel got on the map in a place that was almost off it: Black Canyon, Nev. With the Depression raging in 1931, Bechtel's father helped organize a consortium called Six Companies to tackle the massive engineering job that became known as Hoover Dam. The consortium bid $49 million and made a profit...