More than pipes and wires

If you work remotely from the corporate environment, you sometimes find that things can be a little quirky. But also fun. Really fun.

Within a year or so of joining the SDG&E Purchasing Department, I was promoted to Buyer and given the chance to support a state of the art geothermal power plant 120 miles east of the corporate offices. 

California’s Imperial Valley was as different from San Diego as night from day. Agriculture-based economy pinned to the cycle of the seasons. Sidewalks safely rolled up and asleep by 8:00 PM.  But a good time could always be had just across the border in Mexicali. Or so they’d tell me; sorry, not my cuppa...

Fun at the end of the workday involved the plant manager and me taking our .22 caliber pistols and plinking at cans along the irrigation canals. We’d reward our good marksmanship with a stop at the “Dewdrop Inn” after. (We knew better than to reverse the order: The Duke taugh ... Read more »

What’s your negotiating style? Long term consensus builder or one shot scorched earth practitioner? Hufflepuff or Slytherin? Or maybe a little of all of them…

John Landis was an old-school negotiator for a well-run EPC firm in Washington State specializing in greenfield power plants worldwide. He would always negotiate the stressful and critical power island contracts himself, leaving balance of plant equipment and services to the rest of us.

 In my interview prior to hiring on, he explained his philosophy simply as: “I want the best deal for my company. But sometimes you have to walk around the end of the table and take their side in the negotiations. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

Must have worked – he built an awful lot of power plants around the world.