A colleague recently shared with me this graphic from a Caterpillar presentation he attended, which got me thinking about how managers and owners run their construction businesses. I know the way I’ve managed my company over the years has changed. As we’ve grown we’ve put more formal processes in place and my focus has shifted more toward the bigger picture.

During a recent trip to Arizona, I visited the V-bar-V petroglyph site in the Verde Valley. For those not familiar, petroglyphs are engravings made into rock surfaces and can be found throughout the world. I found the >V-bar-V petroglyphs fascinating to see, but it was their story that really captured my imagination. It turns out that some of the engravings were almost certainly used as part of a solar calendar to help guide the critical timing for crop planting – critical because given the length of the growing season, you could harvest two full crops if you timed things just right.

I was recently on LinkedIn and noticed a question in one of the group forums asking readers to identify the biggest problem facing construction businesses today. The answers ranged from finding quality employees to wanting more control over project documents. One theme, however, seemed to dominate the thread. Intense bidding competition is driving prices so low that contractors cannot both make a profit and perform quality work.

Whether you run a retail, construction, or software company, motivating your employees can be one of the biggest challenges you face in business management. Unmotivated employees often underperform, are tardy or absent, or may end up costing more than they contribute to your construction company. However, if you have highly motivated employees, particularly those with the best interests of the company in mind, not only will you see excellent performance, they will contribute to your profitability.

Last week I discussed three of the biggest perceived reasons why companies hesitate to put their data in the cloud or rely on cloud-based construction software. By perceived, I mean reasons that are based on impressions, sometimes false impressions, of what cloud computing is all about. This week, as promised, I’ll focus on a couple of the real reasons why some companies are slow to adopt computing in the cloud.