Recently Gibbs College dean Hans Butzer (B) and Karen Renfroe (R) of the OU Foundation spoke with OU alumnus Michael McKelvy. They sat down with McKelvy (M) to learn more about his position as CEO of McDermott International, his time at OU, and his ideas for the future of design-build education. Click “play” below to listen to the interview or read on for highlights from the transcript!
B: Good afternoon, Mike. You doing well?
M: Yeah, Hans. How are you?
B: I’m very well.
Well, we appreciate your willingness to make time. I’m so convinced that the students are going to just love your perspective. In this day and age, you probably have figured this out, there’s so much conversation about multiple careers in one’s life. Right? And the idea that we can make a decision today, but that shouldn’t lock us into new opportunities that come ahead in life.
Because we’re recording, I think it’s going to allow us to create this fabulous post for our Gibbs channel and get it in front of students. In fact, next week, in my intro to architecture course, we’ll be talking with some alumni who graduated in the last 10 years and discovering which career paths they took, leveraging their Architecture and Environmental Design degree backgrounds.
If you’re ready, I’ll simply start by asking you to tell, Mike, what is your job today, and what is it that you do with your job today?
M: In my job today, I’m the president and CEO of McDermott International. We’re a global engineering and construction company that designs and builds offshore oil and gas platforms, undersea structures. We lay oil and gas piping on the ocean floor. We also build LNG plants, ethylene plants. We build large hydrogen storage spheres, oil and gas storage tanks. And then we also fabricate everything that we do. We’re a self-preform contractor, and we’ve got about 30,000 people around the world, virtually in every country, and we’re headquartered here in Houston. That is what I do.
B: And as a follow-up, how big is your management team that you meet with on a regular basis?
M: I have an executive committee of about eight people that report directly to me. And that covers my chief financial officer, chief human resources, chief legal, and then my profit center leads, where global profit centers are based on the project type. For our deep-water subsea business, I have a leader for that, and for my offshore Middle East, I have a leader for that business, and then my onshore projects, someone leads that, and then I have global support operations. But anyway, it’s a pretty well-oiled machine, overall.
B: It must be, right? I mean, it sounds like you’ve got a lot of tentacles out there that you have to manage and coordinate. I know our students would be interested to learn more about how did you get to the point where you are today? CEO and President of McDermott, what are the steps in your life paths that got you there, and maybe in reverse chronological order?
M: Probably the penultimate thing was back in 1993, I was working for Lockwood Greene, in Dallas, Texas. I was the manager of the architectural department there. While the architects were in the office, out of an office of 300 people, we had about 15 to 20 architects, and they all reported to me. We were doing industrial projects; we weren’t doing beautiful architectural projects, but they were nonetheless technical industrial buildings. And the head of that office came to me and asked me if I wanted to go to Germany, to open up and run an office for Lockwood Greene.
What was interesting was, I didn’t really think much about it. And I said, sure, I’ll do that. And he said, “Now you do realize that if you do this, you’ll have to be just as excited about an electronic substation project, or a water treatment plant project, or just a canal or something. You have to be just as excited about that, as you would be a building because you may not be doing buildings anymore.” And I remember that was a moment in time when I thought my career was taking a different direction.
I was walking away from buildings. I was walking away from managing all the architects and being the top architect in the office, to doing something totally different. And I said, okay, so that was the real turning point. Because after that point in 1993, I did design some other things along the way. I did continue to stamp projects every so often throughout my career. But really, the turn went into what I would call general management at that point.
B: Yeah. And how many years were you with Lockwood Greene before you took your next step?
M: I was with Lockwood Greene, from 1988 until they were acquired by CH2M Hill in 2005. And when I left CH2M Hill in 2014, I had 27 years between Lockwood Green and CH2M Hill combined.
B: Okay, and then from there, you move to Gilbane?
M: Yeah, I went to Gilbane in 2014, as the CEO of the Gilbane Building Company, and back to buildings again, but as a builder.
B: Right. On the construction side, right?
M: Yeah.
B: It sounds to me like you have a range of skills that have allowed you to flourish in certain specific specialized areas, but then also to be able to branch out and suddenly take on this highly complex management role. Talk a little bit, if you would, about the skills that you developed in school that may have been of some help, but also the skills that you have now that maybe evolved, just by virtue of these unique opportunities that have been presented to you.
M: I think there are two things. The experience in architecture school, and my experience at the University of Oklahoma was just like the traditional experience. There were long hours, long nights, staying up a lot of time, at that time, the school was under the endzone of the stadium, and we would be up there, just 24/7 trying to finish projects, and then we would get into a jury situation, and we would be crucified by the professors and our peers. Our terrible performance, whatever it was, we look back on that fondly.
I’ve mentored a lot of people through the years who are going to architecture school, and they just say, oh, this is too tough, they’re criticizing me, they’re criticizing my creation, they’re criticizing my designs. But I really think that experience of the jury exposure and the presentation, and the really long, long, long, hard effort to get to that completion point, and then when you’re complete, someone is really holding you to the fire. I think that really prepared me for a lot of the things that I had to do in general management.
Because when you’re running and you’re responsible for profit and loss on any kind of business venture, you are really brought into the most difficult situations with the most critical clients or the most egregious situations of conflict. But you have to not only endure, but you have to come out on the other side, as a survivor. And I think that that experience in university, which a lot of other professions, a lot of other majors don’t necessarily have such a tough time that we have, I think that prepared me quite well.
The other thing that prepared me for it was really my father. My father was an architect. He had his own architecture firm when I was growing up, and when I worked for him, he was the sole proprietor. And he would tell me that there are meetings that you go in to, and how the meetings are going to go, it’s like a small battle, the company is going to win, or the company is going to lose in this meeting, or maybe you’re just going to survive the meeting.
But there’s always someone in the meeting from the company side, that is the one that has to do something that will determine whether you lose, you win or you survive. Are you going to be the one who does something? Or are you going to be the spectator to the train wreck? And if you think about that, you go into any kind of business situation, lots of times where you’re walking in the door, something has to happen in that meeting.
And honestly, when you’re new in your career, you might think, thank goodness the boss is the one that’s going to have to fight this. I’m just going to watch this battle. But at some point, you have to be the one to go to battle. And you have to be the one to come out somehow, escape, the best you can. And its few people in the business world that have the ability to go into those circumstances, and to take on those challenges. Either they’re conflict-averse, they’re risk-averse, or it’s too uncomfortable.
But you put the two things together, and experience architecture school where you really are battle-tested, and you’ve put out there and you’re exposed, and you have to live on the decisions that you’ve made. And you’re criticized or praised, depending on what you did. And then you say, okay if it is going to be, my career is going to grow. I’ve got to be the one that makes a difference. And I can’t be the one that makes a difference sitting on the sidelines.
B: Yeah, that’s amazing advice right there. And while we’re on the topic, what kind of work did your dad do?
M: Well, my dad grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. My dad designed churches and universities, and a lot of college buildings. He designed most of LSU Shreveport, and some of LSU. And then, most of Centenary College there in Shreveport and multitudes of churches of all denominations throughout the South. And he ended up really having a grateful career, and I worked for him for a brief time when I first got out of school. But I learned a lot from him.
B: Yeah, that must have been amazing, and also exciting, to see your father’s work around you. Right, and shaping communities, and shaping lives. What year did you get licensed? Or are you licensed?
M: Oh, yeah, I’m licensed in 25 or 30 states. I’m still licensed and I’m still getting my continuing education units every year. I think I got licensed in 1983.
B: ‘83. Was that Louisiana?
M: Yeah. First, well, first, no, my base state was Oklahoma. So got Oklahoma first.
B: Okay. Did you practice in Oklahoma?
M: You know, at the time, I was with CH Guernsey, a company in Oklahoma City.
B: Oh, my word! No way!
M: No. You know, Pat Carroll. I don’t know if you know Pat was the new boss at the time. And I think that was when I worked for them. I was taking the exam. And then I went to work for Lockwood Greene. I must have gotten licensed when I was with Guernsey.
B: Okay, this is great. I love these details. It’s so cool. As you’ve been sharing here and talking about basically traditional practice, right, and then starting to move into companies that are dealing with construction as well as architecture, infrastructure, right, as well as typical buildings, cities, streets and so forth.
Surely, you’ve had time to reflect on the sources of tension and success between architects and builders or contractors? What advice or perspective would you want to share not just with students today, but perhaps also, just as importantly, with faculty?
M: Yeah, it’s interesting, because I have been on both sides, and I’ve been on both sides for a tremendous amount of time. And I always remember when I was doing working drawings, and I was doing building design, and I was managing architectural projects, the contractors were always trying to change what we designed to make it cheaper, right. I mean, that was the typical thing. Or they would not want to construct the detail the way we had designed it and detailed it, and there was going to be a problem with moisture infiltration or structural integrity, or you name it.
There was always something and, even my father, when I went to job sites with him when I was a kid, he would give me binoculars to look up at the ceiling and tell me what to look for, because the contractors would try to punch nails through the tongue and wood ceiling in this chapel and sure enough with the block binoculars, I can see the nails poking through. And he said, “I knew they weren’t going to use the length nail that I specified.” That kind of thing. I grew up thinking it was us against them, that they were going to try to take advantage of us.
And then when I got on to the construction side, particularly at Gilbane, where we are building high-rise skyscrapers in New York City. We’re building art museums, the Corning Glass Museum, we built that, for example. And then we’re building large things for Amazon and pharmaceutical plants and everything else. I saw differently. And so maybe there are contractors that are trying to take advantage. But any project where there’s teamwork between the design team and the construction team as early as possible now, you might call it design-build, you might call it construction management at risk, you might call it, IPD. Whatever you want to call it.
But really the secret sauce is that they start communicating extremely early in the process. Then the construction side really understands what the design side is trying to achieve and can provide advice and counsel along the way. And then the design side can also kind of open up a little bit and say, “this is what I’m trying to achieve. I’m not really sure how to construct this, how would you see that we would construct it.” And then you go back and forth. Because you’ve really got good builders on the construction side. And you’ve got great, great designers, and great detailers, in some cases on the architectural side.
But what I’ve seen disappearing over the last 15 years is the true, architect that really knows how to put the building together. There’s fewer and fewer of them. And I think that’s natural, because so much of the detailing comes from the manufacturers. They’ll send you the window details on CAD, or the curtain wall comes fully, fully detailed. There’s a lot of things that are missing. In the traditional working drawing, understanding. I don’t think it has to be the way it was when I was in school where you were creating every, every detail from scratch. But there are gaps.
B: Yeah.
M: And the gaps have to be filled these days, usually by the builder. And I walk a job site that we were building, and there was something unknown there. The owners were mad, but we don’t have a detail for that because nobody thought about that particular situation of closure where these two materials would meet. Then we’re all trying to figure it out together. I think there’s a need, probably at no other time, where everybody can communicate really, really, closely with each other on both sides. But the days of completing a set of working drawings, 100%. And then you drop them off at the Dodge room, and then you have all the contractors bid them, that doesn’t really happen.
B: Yeah, yeah. It’s almost like a loss of sense of craft, on the architect side, right. I fully appreciate this. And as you’ve already mentioned not only are not all contractors set up to be great collaborators, right, but we also know that not all architects are set up to be great collaborators. I mean, there’s a lot of work to be done on both sides.
M: I talked about this before, Hans, I think you and I, about the builder, the commercial builders have had to bridge the gap from a BIM perspective.
B: Yes.
M: And what they’ve had to do is to take the BIM files from the architects and the engineers, and then take them to a degree of specificity even further, and using their constructability into that, particularly on the higher tech buildings, or the industrial or the pharmaceutical, biotech, or electronic buildings, you’ve got to go to that level of detail. And what advice would I give the professors on this? I think it’s something that’s missing, just the constructability piece of the young architects that I’ve seen a lot of.
B: Yeah. Well, this resonates. Carrying this a little bit forward, right. And again, we touched upon this in a previous conversation a few months ago. What would be the priorities in your mind in college where you have a nationally ranked architecture program, and an amazing Construction Science program whose students are winning the top three places and all regional awards and sometimes national or international student competitions? What would you focus on if you were creating a college that had those two leading programs to make sure we graduated the best possible students that employers would just eat up? Whether architecture or construction?
M: Yeah, if you really think out of the box or you’re not constrained by what the great programs are, you will want people to really spend some time on either side.
B: Yeah.
M: In both programs to where they could cross pollinate a little bit without impacting their degree progression.
B: Yeah.
M: Right. And what I think they would find, if they did that, is maybe they gravitate more toward one side or the other through that process, and so not only are they exposed to more than they would in a traditional, one side or the other path, but then they probably start to get an inkling of what they would really enjoy doing, the most.
B: Yeah, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It’s basically learning another, you know, give them a chance to do a kind of a quick learn someone else’s language, right? Get into their shoes, see things from their perspective, and then step back and see how that changes your own reality, your own framework. This is very helpful, and you’re hitting a lot of the key questions here. And I want to state and be mindful of your time and stand firm.
B: All right. Well, hey, thank you for responding to all the questions, and for the time. Let me turn this around for a second. Do you have questions for me as the Dean of a multidisciplinary college, who’s a big fan of collaboration and interdisciplinary practice?
M: Well, no, I mean, I think what I’ve seen in you is the willingness to reach out and to try to learn so the program can learn and change and develop along the way. And I think that’s correct, right? That you’re, you’re really trying to see what the future will be. The old Wayne Gretzky trying to be where the puck is going to be.
B: You got it!
M: You’re trying to see what architects of the future are going to have to be able to be prepared for. Because the program is like planting a seed, and it takes years for that to actually be the case. And I think collaboration outside of the university environment is a really, really rich thing to do. Are there other plans that you have, in terms of reaching out and trying to connect the students to other parts of the world?
B: Well, thank you for the question. I’m a big fan of this concept of out-of-culture experience, right? And you can define culture in many different ways. And you’re dialed in from a discipline standpoint as a dean of all these different programs, and as a practitioner, I worry about the architect-contractor relationship. And I put on the contractor’s hat, as often as I do the architect’s even though I’m licensed as an architect.
I don’t have a construction background, but I care deeply about how we make buildings and that the experience is right for not only the tradespeople and the practitioners, but for the client, and certainly what the community gets out of it. And I’m continually trying to explore how, in academia, we can get the contractors interested in the perspective of the architect, and the architecture students interested in the contractor’s perspective.
I find my biggest challenge lies at the faculty level, and how to change that culture. With those who are doing the educating, so to speak. The firms want it, right? Every practitioner I talked to, whether it’s a contractor or architect, they’re hungry for graduates who love both sides and are so interested in the overlap. I’m reshaping my board of visitors right now. And I’m looking for contractors who have this great reputation for collaboration. And we’re now plotting some symposia every year, where we have architects and contractors get in front of the students and talk about their experiences getting something built.
And exactly like you and I are talking about right now: what can we do differently? The same thing isn’t getting us the desired outcome in the 21st century. And my interest is in engaging faculty and finding the right voice that will convince them that they need to recalibrate how they teach. The students want it, and the practitioners want it. But it’s the faculty I need to change.
M: It may be a bridge, I mean. While we were talking, we didn’t really talk about ESG, and we didn’t talk about sustainability, right? The connection, really, between all things, is that bridge of sustainability. And I remember one time. I think this might be something that could help people think about other things. I had a young man that worked for me, and he was ahead of his time thinking about this kind of thing.
And we were doing a large project, this was at CH2M Hill, actually many years ago. And he came in and he said, we’ve specified gravel underneath the concrete for all of the parking and all the driveways and the roadways and everything on this project. He said, if we were able to use an alternate material, the gravel is being trucked by dump trucks and it’s going to be 1000 dump trucks from you know 50 miles away, and I’ve calculated the amount of carbon that these dump trucks are going to be putting into the atmosphere.
There’s a local power plant about a mile away from the site and we can get fly ash from the power plant. We can substitute the gravel base with the fly ash, and we can eliminate the dump trucks. We can tell the client how much carbon we’re saving. It was the collaboration of a sustainability idea, with a constructability idea, with a design detail specified, and he brought them all together. And the end result was something that was better for the planet.
I think if you’ve got people that it’s not their nature to collaborate, maybe the whole issue of sustainability or net zero, or just doing something green can actually bring everybody together. Because everyone seems to agree that that’s something that we should all try to strive to do together, but you can’t achieve it by yourself.
B: Okay. That was fascinating. Wow. Well, I have so many more questions, actually now, but I know that your time is precious. Karen, did you have any other questions for Mike?
R: Well, I just was curious. Mike, this has been great for me. I’ve learned a lot. But I’m curious about your adjustment from Massachusetts to Houston.
M: Well, I was born in Shreveport, I went to Oklahoma, then I went back to Shreveport, then went back to Oklahoma, then I went to Dallas. Then I went to Germany, then Germany to Dallas, Dallas to South Carolina, South Carolina to Denver, Denver to Boston, Boston to Houston. Okay, so moving and relocating from a business perspective is something that I’ve always just done. Traveling all over the world is something that I’ve done for many, many years.
Probably the biggest thing I had to deal with was when I got the call to see whether I was interested in the CEO position at McDermott. I said to them, I said, I’m not an oil and gas energy guy. I’ve been CEO of a commercial building enterprise for the last seven and a half years. And before that, I was industrial with CH2M Hill, etc. But not oil and gas specifically. I’m not sure that I’m the person that you want.
And the answer was that we’re looking for leadership. We have plenty of people that understand the industry. And I think that’s a key factor for kids that are in school and are looking at their careers. It really is about leadership. And it’s easier to teach a leader the nuances of the industry of the business than it is to teach a business or industry leader, or an industry technology subject matter expert to be a leader.
B: Yep. Yeah. Well, we just appreciate your time. Thank you for connecting with us.
M: I enjoyed it. And I’ll get with you, and hopefully I’ll run into you in Norman sometime.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.