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Show Harvard -6- the engineering organization to solicit work very successfully from certain major industries such as the petroleum industry, public utility industry, and the chemical industry, that had a repeating demand for construction and engineering services. By placing themselves in a position to offer both the engineering and the construction, Bechtel obtained and has continued to hold a real competitive advantage in obtaining work where the real key to the program was to design and to guarantee performance of complicated processing. As a result, I am told most of Bechtel's work is performed for some 8 companies and largely on a cost plus a fee basis with the construction thrown in with the engineering. They have done a splendid job. Perhaps the most speculative example of what I am talking about is the Henry J. Kaiser Company which utilized its construction know-how as a springboard to launch Permanente Cement, Kaiser Aluminum, and Kaiser Steel. The job has been done so successfully that their industrial companies now over-shadow their construction company which is largely kept busy performing work for its own offspring. Even in the building field we have examples of the use of ingenuity and foresight to gain a competitive advantage. We just lost a building contract which by all rights should have been ours to Cahill Brothers, because John Cahill has been astute enough to recognize that in the field of office buildings the control of the strategic site can often be the key to success. He has been daring enough to purchase and to hold strategically located downtown office building sites, for use when the appropriate time came. These sites he has either off ered to other who wished to erect an office building or has used to erect an office building of his own which he could finance against the guaranteed occupancy furnished by others. We in Utah Construction Company have also followed the policy of the unusual approach and, perhaps to a greater extent than most of our competitors, have diversified our operations into wider fields of construction in an industry where most people tend to specialize in one type of work. Starting shortly after World War II we began a program of diversification that has now achieved these results. Our operations are spread from Alaska on the North to Peru on the South, France on |