John R. Lawson II doubled down on his most important duty as W.M. Jordan Co.’s chief executive: succession planning. Spending the last several years grooming future leaders at the Newport News. Va.-based firm, the 66-year-old Lawson didn’t just prep potential top executives from the next generation, but also employees from the one after that. “We’re training two generations simultaneously,” says Lawson, who just relinquished the president and CEO title he assumed 32 years ago.

On Aug. 6, W.M. Jordan named Ronald J. Lauster Jr. president and James C. Burnett chief financial officer. The company says it will announce additional promotions early this fall, noting that appointees from what Lawson sees as the third generation of the firm will serve 15 years maximum while the fourth generation is honed. “I want them to know they are going to be the leaders of the fourth generation and that I’m going to provide ownership opportunities for them,” Lawson says.

The changes not only come during Jordan’s 60th anniversary, but four months after co-founder Robert T. Lawson died at the age of 91. After buying out William Jordan, the other co-founder, in 1985, the Lawsons transformed the firm from a local general contractor into a regional construction manager that is ranked No. 175 on ENR’s 2018 Top 400 Contractors list, with $492.6 million in revenue. That’s up from $396.7 million the previous year, when the firm ranked No. 207.

2017年,乔丹获得了4.0907亿美元的地区revenue, a 17% increase from the previous year. This year, the firm placed 19th on ENR MidAtlantic’s Top Contractors ranking for the second straight year. The contractor employs 286 across two MidAtlantic offices.

该公司在几年前放弃了传统的战略规划和年度绩效评论，因为它认为它们创造了自上而下的管理。该公司还不相信微观管理员工的工作方式或如何度过时间。员工可以在工作时间内自由享受校园健身中心和有机花园。劳森（Lawson）认为，这些便利设施为员工提供了健康的机会，同时还可以建立参与和友情。

The firm’s 0.68 experience modification rate for 2018 will be effective Sept. 30. The firm also gives to more than 200 charities each year and maintains long-term involvement with the United Way, Salvation Army, An Achievable Dream Academy and ACE Mentoring. Additionally, since 1990, W.M. Jordan has raised more than $2.5 million for Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters through its charity golf tournament that hosts more than 400 players.

These accomplishments, and many more, have earned W.M. Jordan recognition as ENR MidAtlantic’s Contractor of the Year.

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文章索引：

• Profitable Development
• Hokie Nation
• Corporate Wellness
• 生命周期

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Profitable Development

W.M.Jordan has remained profitable every year since its founding in 1958, including during the recession a decade ago. At the start of the downturn, Lawson pulled his firm out of all condominium work after being unnerved by his service on a bank-loan committee, where he saw doctors and lawyers “flipping condos and developing subdivisions.”

Aside from avoiding the housing-market collapse, Lawson also correctly bet that the commodities market would sink. He refused to lock in material prices with subcontractors on federal design-build contracts.

该公司没有裁员或人员减少，在经济衰退期间没有减少工资或福利。该公司通过以折扣价购买大型收入的物业来补充其在经济衰退期间的建设收入。乔丹今天仍然多样化，从与非建设相关的活动中获得了三分之一的利润，例如对公司建造的酒店和办公楼的投资。

For example, W.M. Jordan Development Co. is co-developing a mixed-use project focused on medical, science and tech startups called Building One @ Tech Center. The 80,000-sq-ft building, projected to finish this fall, is the first of 11 buildings at a 50-acre Newport News research park adjacent to the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

该项目也位于NASA兰利研究中心附近，约旦正在建造9,900万美元的测量系统实验室。175,000平方英尺的设施将包括洁净室，电磁和射频屏蔽室，会议空间和数据中心。该项目计划在春季交付。

Hokie Nation

The Tech Center is being developed with support from Lawson’s alma mater, Virginia Tech. In 2006, Lawson—together with Ross Myers, CEO of Worcester, Pa.-based contractor Allan Myers—helped endow VT’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction, which will be expanded by hundreds of students after the university builds its Intelligent Infrastructure and Construction Complex. The project is being put out to bid this fall and includes two new buildings and a smart dining facility.

Jordan declined to say if it will pursue the project. The firm didn’t compete for work at VT until after Lawson’s last term on the school’s board of visitors ended in 2010. Jordan has since been awarded six of the school’s projects worth more than $135 million combined. “They’ve never been late on a project; in fact, most projects have finished early,” says Sherwood Wilson, VT’s vice president for operations.

目前，约旦正处于5600万美元的Holden Hall翻新工程中。预计将于2019年5月开始进行21,000平方英尺的翻新工程和81,000平方英尺的建设。

Wilson says Jordan’s campus projects become living laboratories that let students see the concepts their professors teach in real time. Many VT students intern and work for the firm. Jordan currently has 49 Virginia Tech graduates as full-time employees, 21 of whom came through the firm’s intern program. This year, 12 of the firm’s 28 interns attend Virginia Tech.

Corporate Wellness

In his new executive chairman role, Lawson plans to focus on “crazy ideas I dream up that nobody understands until I’ve done it.” For example, Lawson abandoned traditional strategic planning and annual performance reviews in the 1990s in favor of a strategy of “continual improvement” in which the firm aims to “do better every single day than you did the day before.”

劳森说，战略规划设定了与利润和收入相关的“不纯雇佣目标”。他说：“人们不想将自己的野心，工作和创造力奉献给数字游戏。”同样，劳森（Lawson）说，年度评论并不能满足千禧一代的工作风格。劳森说：“他们希望每日评论都知道他们一直在做什么。”

该公司表示，它为员工提供了“结构和纪律”，而无需决定如何完成工作。该公司说：“我们提出问题以进行考虑，并允许员工以自己的创意做出回应。”约旦的虚拟建筑协调员杰夫·比恩（Geoff Bean）表示，有纬度可以代表公司做出“高级”决定，“使您感到自己拥有它；它在游戏中给您带来皮肤。”

Lawson says his most creative ideas come to him while he’s exercising. That’s why he launched the firm’s wellness program about six years ago. He hired his personal trainer, Julie Dixon, as the firm’s wellness director and built a 1,860-sq-ft gym in an old bank building on the firm’s Newport News campus. The program includes a full slate of exercise classes and a 34,332-sq-ft organic garden with fresh fruits and vegetables for employees and their families. The garden includes 33 raised planter beds, each with an approximately 5-ft by 20-ft planting area. The firm also built gyms in the Richmond and Wilmington, N.C., offices.

Approximately 80% of employees participate in the program, and Dixon says they are happier and more engaged. She says they encourage each other to attend workouts, walk the jobsite and avoid soda. “People are more productive, she says. “They are sick a lot less.”

Lawson says the wellness program has helped lower the cost of the firm’s self-insured group health plan four out of the last five years. But he contends that the program’s biggest benefit is teambuilding. He says camaraderie created in the gym naturally spills into the field. And, he adds, 90% of a project’s value comes from the first 10% of the effort put into a project “building your team in preconstruction.”

生命周期

W.M.Jordan’s 60th year has not only brought big changes for the firm, but for Lawson personally. In a two-month span, he eulogized his father; Virginia Tech’s president emeritus, Charles Steger Jr.; and his best friend, Bo Waddill, who handled Jordan’s insurance bonding.

尽管他遭受了损失，但劳森说他现在生活在当下。他说：“这并不是全部关于未来。”尽管如此，他花了六年的时间制定继任计划。该过程涉及在斯坦福大学，哈佛大学和沃顿商学新利18备用院的高级领导力培训计划中注册几名第三代高管，而几位第四代领导人参加了该领域的管理学院。Lauster，W.M。乔丹的新总统说，他的哈佛大学计划帮助他“仔细地看着自己”，并“确定我的长处和缺点”。

Lauster says he’s “not trying to be John Lawson,” whom ENR MidAtlantic named as its inaugural Legacy Award winner in 2014, but will instead use his own “talents and abilities to build on [Lawson’s] success as we move into the future.”

While Lauster represents the firm’s first president from outside the firm’s two founding families, two of Lawson’s three children spent the summer interning at the firm. They might work at the firm one day. But Lawson—who turned down a lucrative job with a Dallas oil company after graduating college to work on crews in the field for Jordan—says his children will have to make their own decision like he did. “If it doesn’t happen naturally,” he says, “it doesn’t usually last.”