A BUILDING’S HEALTH IS ITS WEALTH AFTER SPEAKING AT THE SCSI ANNUAL CONFERENCE, PROF. JOHN MACOMBER OF HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL SPOKE TO THE SURVEYORS JOURNAL ABOUT HEALTHY BUILDINGS, UNHEALTHY BUILDINGS AND HOW THE LATTER ARE GOING TO BE AT A DISTINCT COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE FROM NOW ON.
A
fter decades working in the
but it wasn’t academically very interesting. There’s
parts per million of carbon, but I am qualified to
construction
in
no new knowledge about how to build and flip an
talk about steel and concrete and cash flow. The
industry
Boston, John Macomber sold
office building. It’s easy to conceptualise, it’s hard
idea of how can we figure out how to get more
his company in 2006 and joined the faculty of
to do. But I started doing a couple of things with
capital into mass transit, roads, bridges,
Harvard Business School a year later to teach
my Harvard Business School colleagues. One is I
renewable energy, things like that, was a place I
Real Estate 101. This covered how to build a
started working with our people in the business
could contribute”.
housing subdivision and how to buy and flip an
and environment initiative. I’m not qualified to talk
John started teaching an elective course called
office building, he says: “That was useful to teach
about Paris Accords, I’m not qualified to talk about
Sustainable Cities and Resilient Infrastructure.
INTERVIEW Colm Quinn Journalist and Sub-Editor, Think Media
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SURVEYORS JOURNAL Volume 10, Issue 4, Winter 2020
