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If you think that this is impossible today, you’re...
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You’ve probably heard about a space ship hitting badly Venus or Mars, I don’t remember, because of miscalculations, right? Well, that’s everywhere. When you do your taxes, when you calculate your retirement or when you receive an inheritance. All are miscalculation errors. In construction, there are everywhere. In 1970, during the construction of the Kadena Air Base Bridge in Okinawa, Japan, engineers made a slight miscalculation. As usual… Two teams started building from opposite sides of the river, expecting to meet perfectly in the middle. But when they finally got close... one side was 2 meters higher than the other! I mean… not 1 cm, not 2 cm, not 10 cm… just 2 meters. The error? One team had used metric measurements, while the other worked in imperial units. If you think that this is impossible today, you’re absolutely wrong. If you don’t believe me, check this list of lessons learnt from my last project.
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Vicente Valencia
I talk about Personal Growth, Management, Infrastructure and More | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
You hear this word a lot in PPP meetings. Bankable. “This contract must be bankable.” Everyone nods. No one asks the obvious question. What does bankable actually mean? Let me translate. A PPP contract is bankable when a bank can look at it and say: “Fine. If everything goes wrong… we still get our money back.” That’s it. Not innovation. Not sustainability. Not beautiful PowerPoints. Money back. In Question 50 of the course below, I explain what really makes a PPP contract bankable. Because...
Innovation is one of the biggest fallacies in construction and PPP contracts. Governments love the word. It appears in every PowerPoint presented to ministers, investors and journalists. Innovation. Innovation. Innovation. But what exactly is innovation? A toilet that cleans your as$ with a water jet and eliminates toilet paper. Innovation? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends. In Question 28 of the course below, I explain how “innovation” actually works in PPP bids. How to win points if you are...
One of my fauvorites… A toll road PPP. Beautiful business model. Traffic studies. Economic growth projections. Sophisticated demand modelling. Consultants everywhere. Like queuing for free ice-cream… The road opened in 2007. The project was the South Bay Expressway SR‑125 toll road. Everything looked perfect on paper. Except for one small detail. Drivers. They didn’t show up. The financial model predicted tens of thousands of vehicles per day. Reality? Sometimes traffic was 70–80% lower than...