President's Memo

September 2003

CONCRETE, Anyone?

by José M. Izquierdo-Encarnación

The summer has been a very interesting one. As ACI President, I have been fortunate to travel around the U.S. and Latin America. I’ve attended a number of different meetings, and came away quite impressed with the great efforts our various volunteer groups make in complying with their responsibilities. I worry somewhat, even with all the effort, that we may somehow lose focus of what ACI is all about.

Therefore, let’s summarize and review the goals of ACI International based on the Strategic Plan that was approved a few years ago. I know you may think, "There goes another ACI President trying to sell the Strategic Plan." But as noted in the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the first habit suggested is to "Begin with the end in mind." To complete any task, quest, mission, or goal in life, it is essential that we start by knowing in our hearts what it is we are trying to accomplish.

ACI Past President Dick White led the great effort that resulted in our Strategic Plan, which fostered a whole wave of changes within the Institute. The Plan brought us the following goals:

  • Knowledge Generation;
  • Knowledge Promulgation;
  • Knowledge Community;
  • Competent Workforce; and
  • Member Value.

You can find details about the particular goals on the ACI website. As noted in a previous President’s Memo, we have to really understand who we are and where we are moving as an organization. To depict what ACI is all about, I’d like to use some graphical representations.

During the last 10 years, I have worked within several ACI task groups, and one of the main goals has been to keep ACI conscious of the concrete industry itself. Figure 1 depicts a real-world scenario, the real industry. The icons above the blue line represent the concrete community. ACI is part of that community, but how do we focus on our strategies, recognizing the importance of the industry as a whole?

Well, let’s look at the triangle in Fig. 2. ACI is the backbone of the concrete industry. As such, we produce documents that help improve industry efforts and results, the documents that our industry/community uses, transforms, and evolves for its particular needs. If the center of the triangle is taken to be the concrete community, then every ACI committee, task group, and staff member belongs to or participates in the activities denoted by one of the sides.

At the triangle base is Knowledge Production. (Remember our motto: progress through knowledge?) That is the essence of what ACI does. On one side, we have Research and Practice that feeds us the information about new developments and practical experience we transform into usable knowledge. On the other side, we have Promulgation. It is essential to our industry that the knowledge developed, and which we assess and validate, is promulgated; or in the Biblical sense, that we spread the gospel.

Each side of the triangle in Fig. 2 has to work in perfect harmony. Without integration of those three sectors, the industry/concrete community cannot be successful, nor can ACI.

Therefore, I ask each one of you to think about your tasks and responsibilities within the industry because you are part of one, or more, sides of the triangle. It is like the old story of the two workers on a construction project. When asked what they were doing, the first replied, "Laying bricks," but the second one answered, "I am building a cathedral."

Regardless of what you contribute to ACI—whether volunteer or staff member—in the end, CONCRETE is what we do.



Fig. 1: A model of the concrete community



Fig. 2: ACI is at the center of the concrete community

José M. Izquierdo-Encarnación, President
American Concrete Institute
pepe@porticus-ingenieria.com

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