Our man in hong kong

How did you get here?

My father was an architect. He used to go into work on a Saturday morning and would take me with him to site. I guess it was watching the builders at work from an early age that led me to decide to become an architect.

How would you describe yourself?

Driven, very focused on what I intend to do. I found that if I concentrate on one thing until I finished it, I could move onto the next thing.

Why did you sell Pickavance Consulting to Hill International?

I was running two offices at the time, in London and Hong Kong. In every case on litigation and arbitration you have to have testifying witnesses. I was the only one in a practice of 25 people who could do that role which meant the business was extremely vulnerable. So in 2000 I brought in a chief executive whose role it was to bring in other people who could fulfil the same role and take some of the focus from me. He had a five-year plan to build it up to a position where I was irrelevant to the practice. Then in 2005 I had four offers from three different outfits but I thought Hill best fitted with what we did.

Why did you decide to set up in Hong Kong?

I had been asked to go out there and do some work with the Hong Kong Airport Authority.

I gave a talk to the Society of Construction Law when I was there and everyone was coming over and saying ‘you ought to open an office here’. One guy offered to operate a telephone for me to see how things went.

In the space of six months we had three or four people working for us.

Is it a good place to work?

People are very enthusiastic, very bright, very ambitious. You see things on a different scale than we do in England. Like the ‘Y-bridge’ [linking Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai] which is is going to be 60km long. It’s the sort of engineering work you don’t see in England.

How will you balance working in Hong Kong with your presidential duties?

We should all be more aware of how we live our lives

Although the head office is in the UK, there are offices all round the world. Recently I represented the CIOB at a signing of a joint venture between the Chongqing government and the UK government. That was a three-hour flight for me. I will fly in for the trustees board meeting once a month and I’ll try to get appointments in the UK for that time.

What is your carbon footprint like and does it matter?

It is a big issue for all of us. We should all be more aware of how we live our lives; whether we buy bottled water or use plastic carrier bags. These things are important.

If everybody reduced carbon use by 5% it would make a phenomenal difference to the way the world works. But you cannot get rid of international travel, you cannot go back to the dark ages.

What will be the theme of your presidential year?

My year is also the 175th anniversary so a great deal of the focus will be the celebration of that. I also want to focus on things like sustainability, which is going to be very important for the next 25 years.

What do you think the CIOB is all about?

The CIOB’s job is to promote excellence in construction management. That’s it. It does that through research, education, certification, arbitration. People who become members of CIOB have a valuable worldwide qualification.

What do you think are the biggest issues facing the industry today?

There are an enormous number of big projects in the Middle East and other areas employing hundreds of thousands of people and the big challenges of these construction sites are creating difficulties around the globe. We’ve got an itinerant industry at the moment: there are people from China going to work in the Turks and Caicos Islands and people from Poland coming to work in England. To compete you have to recognise that your resources are internationally based.

Competence in risk management is also very important. At the grass roots of risk management is how you plan to execute the work, how you execute it and then how you sort out any differences. It requires a high level of competence of the people who are planning the work so we need high standards, training, education and qualifications.

In general, the employer and his consultants tend to leave all time management to the contractor, which I don’t think is a sensible way of going about it.