Hey everyone,

Now that we’ve busted the #1 myth about smart buildings, today I want to tell you something you might not know about foundations.

No, I don’t mean the Nexus Foundations course… although we’ll get to that.

I mean the actual foundations of buildings and how they’re built. That might sound boring, and I thought so too, until I kept having this dreadful recurring dream.

It would start out as a normal day in the office. Then, little by little, I could feel the building start to sway in the wind. It would oscillate more and more until it eventually came crashing down.

One night, after shooting up in bed, terrified, I grabbed my phone and googled the following:

“What keeps our buildings from falling?”

One of those things, turns out, is the foundation. And you can understand a lot about foundations if you grasp the two main categories of foundations used in construction: Deep and shallow.

Since the land holding our buildings up can be comprised of many different types of soils, stones, sediments, and more, foundation designs must accommodate how these variables within the earth impact construction and structural integrity.

Deep foundations are required when building on sand and other soft soil that will not be able to absorb the load of the building. Instead, a foundation must be established deep underground or even underwater, where contact with stronger layers of the earth can be established. Deep foundations are essential to the construction of large structures.

Shallow foundations are wider than they are deep. They’re useful when the building isn’t exceedingly heavy and the soil can bear a significant amount of weight at a shallow depth. They don’t require much in the way of digging or boring into the earth and for that reason, they are the most common.

Why am I telling you this? Because this deep vs. shallow dichotomy is a great way to think about your smart building technology education.

While each building only needs one type of foundation, smart building programs need leaders with both shallow and deep foundations.

Shallow smart building foundations are wider than they are deep. They help us:

• Understand the complex history of the industry and where it’s headed tomorrow, which will inform your Smart Building Strategy today
• Keep a pulse on the industry’s continuing evolution and our unique role in it
• Form successful partnerships and relationships with complimentary experts in other domains

Deep smart building foundations are where are the nerdier details live that actually make the technology work in the real world. They help us:

• Build a Smart Building Strategy, which is vital for avoiding those landmines I talked about earlier in this series
• Build our own personal monopoly in the industry—your unique role and career path, where no one else can compete with you

Building a smart building foundation is about balancing the shallow with the deep. Weak spots sneak into our foundations when we:

• Make rookie mistakes that we could have learned from others
• Buy into the industry’s Myth of Competition
• Let our fear of getting out of the building and talking to people prevent us from including each key stakeholder in the project
• Oversimplify or overcomplicate the Strategy
• Don’t learn how to tailor the Strategy to the unique situation

It’s with this balance in mind that I made the career changes I told you about at the beginning of this series. And it’s with this balance in mind that we built our introductory course on the smart buildings industry, Nexus Foundations.

Tomorrow, I’ll take you through all the details of this upcoming cohort and answer FAQs about what it’s like inside the program.

See you then,

James

P.S. There’s one email left in this series, but if you’re all set to join the program for Cohort 2, you can click here and hit the big green “Enroll Now” button. Registration closes on February 17th.