for their products that they could survive for quite a while even if their management somehow went to pot. In the construction business there isn't any such momentum to carry you. Management's ingenuity is constantly put to the test to keep assets profitably employed. By the end of 1945 Utah Construction Company had completed two phases of a history that is typical of many businesses. From 1900 to 1935 it had grown rapidly, first as a successful railroad builder and later as a builder of great dams. Its original $25, 000 capital had become several million dollars, and its founders--the young men who started it--were no longer at the helm. There followed a 10-year period of slow, rather steady growth, unspectacular and unmarked by the daring or the imaginative approach that has characterised the Company's activities since 1945. The spark that ignited the new drive in the Company was a man--an uncommon man with rare gifts--imagination, vision, great energy and drive, a keen sixth sense of the profit opportunity, great knowledge in many fields. His name was Allen Christensen, and he is today President of our Company. In 1945 he was not yet 40; he had worked for the Company since getting his Master's degree in engineering from Stanford in 1929. He was the District Manager in Salt Lake, having survived many of the more menial jobs in construction and having overcome the problem of being the son of one of the Company's early Vice Presidents. This legacy of being the boss's son often can be more of a burden than the blessing some think it should be. Like a rich mineral deposit Allen Christensen had been there all the time but he was suddenly "discovered." Like a rich mineral deposit, he has what miners call an "overlay"--a surface layer of quiet manner, self-restraint, a natural reluctance--or perhaps even inability--to sound 3