410 Days

THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY loves the Empire State Building. Not the building itself, but the story.

Thirteen months from breaking ground to opening day. 410 days to be precise. Under budget by nearly $20 million. During the Depression. It’s often used as proof that we’ve somehow regressed; that despite technological advances at our disposal, flatlining productivity and increased complexity have hobbled an industry to deliver worse than it did a century ago.

The principle sounds great but it’s also shallow. A century ago you could get a tooth extracted in a pub. Progress is funny like that.

Modern buildings are not the same product. The Empire State Building had no automated control systems, no active fire suppression, and spent less than 15% on MEP. Modern high rises have thousands of BMS points, multiple integrated life safety systems, and MEP can exceed half of construction cost. Plus they have to get through Gateway 2.

And yet the analogy points to something real.

Bent Flyvbjerg[1] gives the argument its sharpest edge.  His view is that too many modern projects “think fast, act slow”,  committing early on incomplete designs, then redesigning during delivery.

The Empire State Building did the opposite. The building was “finished entirely  on paper” before work began. Every beam, rivet, window, and limestone block was specified. The design was shaped by buildability. The builders had just completed a similar tower. Repetition was designed in — the team described it as building the same floor a hundred times and stacking them. Then construction ran like a vertical assembly line, hitting a floor a day, completing in 410 days.

Flyvbjerg’s prescription is closely aligned with industrialised construction principles: restore planning discipline, embrace modularity, put experienced teams in charge, minimise the “window of doom” where things can go wrong. These principles are sound.

But there’s a second question his analysis doesn’t really answer: why did that system hold together under pressure? A programme moving at speed needs problems to surface immediately or they compound. And problems only surface early when people feel safe raising them.

The Fairness Dividend

David Bodanis, in The Art of Fairness[2], uses the Empire State Building as a case study in leadership. His finding was that the project’s speed wasn’t achieved through command-and-control, but through something closer to a high-trust production system.

The project’s leaders, particularly the project director, Paul Starrett, built genuine teams. They listened. They gave credit. They treated workers and suppliers as partners rather than inputs to be optimised. In an era when construction was notoriously brutal, they created conditions where thousands of people actively wanted to solve problems rather than hide them.

This wasn’t soft. The programme was aggressive, the expectations clear, the accountability real. But the accountability operated within a framework of mutual respect. Problems surfaced early because people weren’t afraid to raise them. Coordination happened because relationships were genuine. The schedule was met not because people were threatened, but because they were trusted.

In the years leading up to the Empire State’s construction, workers were treated appallingly. Wages sat at around $7 a day for labourers. If they wanted a hot meal, they lost pay for the time it took to climb down, find a food wagon, and climb back up. Safety laws scarcely existed. Deaths were routine as perilous cranes went up.

Starrett’s approach was radical. He more than doubled basic wages to $15 a day. He installed subsidised restaurants on floor after floor of the building as it rose. He assigned dedicated squads to ensure all gaps in floor cover — for elevators, hoists — were well-marked and protected. Workers received full pay on days when the wind was too high to work safely.

To many observers, it looked like generosity bordering on naïvety.

Give, But Audit

What Starrett was doing is what economists call providing efficiency wages: pay more, treat workers better, and in theory you get better, more motivated staff. But one might echo Enrico Fermi’s remark when presented with theories about advanced civilisations among the stars: “Then where is everybody?” If this approach is so effective, why doesn’t every organisation operate this way?

The answer is that generosity alone isn’t enough.

Starrett had survived years in New York construction,  a life experience, as David Bodanis notes  that “disabuses anyone of belief in the inherent benevolence of mankind.” This experience led him to adapt the Russian phrase of “trust but verify” to “give, but audit.”

Starrett brought in a Canadian engineer, John Bowser. Bowser – a man who had left home aged 11 and worked construction around the world., He knew every possible subterfuge and was described as having “tact and infinite patience” combined with a “forceful personality.”

To stop headcount fraud, Bowser hired staff to physically visit each worker on site: twice in the morning, twice in the afternoon. Given that many workers spent their days on beams up to 1,000 feet above the ground, this wasn’t easy. But as Bowser’s records note: “This method takes away from the foreman the temptation of favouring [non-existent] accounts.”

To keep inventory from walking away, Bowser employed accountants who clambered through the building checking that equipment remained where it was supposed to be.

Starrett could only keep being fair if he made sure fairness ran both ways.

Fairness without verification gets exploited. Verification without fairness produces compliance without commitment. The combination creates conditions where honest coordination becomes rational.

From Rhetoric to Reality

The sector hasn’t rejected these ideas. If anything, it has embraced them, at least in language. The Construction Playbook makes collaborative approaches the default for government projects. Early contractor involvement and target cost models are common. The direction is right.

But there often remains a gap between partnership as rhetoric and partnership as operating reality. And the principles tend to be applied separately, not as one system.

Industrialisation is often pursued as a technical agenda: MMC, DfMA, platforms, repeatable components. Commercial strategy is pursued as a contractual agenda: risk allocation, incentives, Fairness is pursued as a governance agenda: collaboration charters, social value commitments, metrics, reporting.

Each strand has its own logic. Each can improve in isolation. But 410 days wasn’t achieved by three separate initiatives. It was achieved because the production method, the commercial terms, and the workforce bargain all pointed in the same direction.

When they don’t, the interface costs swallow the gains.

The Empire State Building showed what genuine integration looks like. Not soft. Not naive. A system where fair treatment and rigorous verification reinforce each other, where people raise problems early because they trust the bargain, and where that trust is maintained because the bargain is visibly kept.

 The Real Lesson

410 days is not a rebuke to modern tools. It’s a reminder that tools don’t integrate themselves. The industry’s nostalgia for Empire State Building is overly simplistic but history still has something useful to teach.

As industrialised construction gains momentum, we should pair it deliberately with workforce bargains that people believe in, and commercial models that make fairness credible. Pursued together, these elements reinforce each other, just as they did in 1931.

That’s the real lesson of 410 days: not longing for what’s been lost, but clarity about what combination makes delivery hold together.

 

This is why Akerlof specialises in industrialised construction, commercial strategy, and social value, connected into delivery models that hold together.

 

[1] Flyvbjerg, Bent, and Dan Gardner. How Big Things Get Done (2024)

[2] Bodanis, David. The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean.