Will Green Construction Products Create A New Group Of Outliers?

By Shawn Zuver, editorial/content director

I recently read an interesting book titled Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. As Gladwell explains, an outlier is something or someone that lies outside the normal experience. Subtitled “The Story of Success”, a great deal of Outliers is devoted to Gladwell’s analysis of the factors that led to the successes of a variety of people in many different fields.

Of course, I’d like to apply Gladwell’s ideas to the metal construction industry—in particular the green construction movement that’s currently underway.

You may be familiar with Gladwell from a couple of his previous bestselling books, Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point. Outliers (published in late 2008 by Little, Brown and Company) once again showcases Gladwell’s unique ability to analyze everyday life.

One of the more interesting ideas that Gladwell explores in Outliers is how ideal circumstances, when met with thorough—some may say obsessive—preparedness, have led to remarkable successes. Among the examples he cited were some famous ones like rock music legends the Beatles and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, along with lesser-known garment industry moguls, corporate litigation attorneys, world class musicians, and Asian rice farmers.

While Gladwell points to the importance of having a great window of opportunity to extraordinary success, he also stresses the preparedness factor. In the case of the Beatles and Gates, for example, he notes that each had spent at least 10,000 hours in honing their skills to be able to take advantage of the rare opportunity that was presented to them. He says that over and over this 10,000-hour rule can be found when analyzing world-class performances. He believes that those high levels of performance are almost always the product of diligent work/practice rather than the “natural” talent, which is often credited.

By applying a couple of Gladwell’s observations to the metal construction industry, it seems to me that a new group of outliers may soon emerge among the architects, contractors and suppliers of green products. We continue to see product innovations each week from established suppliers of metal construction products—and I should note that these are suppliers who have far more than the 10,000 hours of devotion to their craft that Gladwell mentions. Meanwhile there is an ever-growing awareness of sustainable construction through government- and private-sponsored initiatives around the globe, programs like the US Green Building Council’s LEED, and a groundswell of support from a broad base of building and home owners.

Combining the metal construction industry’s level of preparedness with the window of opportunity that is opening up, it wouldn’t surprise me to see that architects and contractors who embrace the future of green metal construction products will reap monetary rewards of professional success, while also having the pride and satisfaction of knowing that they’re offering quality products that do their part to save natural resources for future generations.

If you’d like to learn more about a variety of sustainable products, check out the Green Products and EnergyPeak™ building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) solar roofing sections on this site. And be sure to read the monthly columns by Scott Kriner of Green Metal Consulting, one of the leading experts on sustainability metal construction products.

And if you’d like to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, or his previous books like The Tipping Point or Blink, they can be purchased at www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com.

Shawn Zuver is editorial/content director for DesignandBuildwithMetal.com. He has been covering the metal construction industry, including residential and non-residential construction, since 1985. To contact Shawn, call (419) 581-2051 or email shawnz@designandbuildwithmetal.com.  

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