3. Regulatory Issues

My wife and I felt that the various regulatory issues regarding our project would best be dealt with by pretending they did not exist or claiming to not be aware of them—a "don't ask, don't ask policy," you might call it. Readers may again be tempted to scoff at our decision, but when you are running a ruthlessly efficient, just-in-time supply chain and accounting for it all with a sloppy mental ledger, you really can't afford to get bogged down in legalese. The executives at Exxon who allowed a relapsed alcoholic to pilot a 200,000-ton oil tanker through the Prince William Sound in 1989 probably know what we're talking about.

However, since our loft is situated in a cooperative apartment building and our fellow shareholders had deeply held beliefs (stated in building by-laws) about what should be allowed in their building, we were very quickly forced into compliance with a host of regulations regarding such things as electrical load, Jacuzzi power, interior soundproofing, and grout-density specifications. The resulting delays have been both costly and catalyzing of certain process inefficiencies. Who knows? Had we been more compliance-minded, perhaps we would have hot water in our unit by now.

4. Management
On this crucial issue, my wife and I elected to manage on a consensus basis, allowing important decisions to be delayed or forgotten about and then hastily resolved by my wife at the job site at the last minute. This system consistently resulted in late, ill-informed, and badly thought-through orders that tended to backfire, bringing on later, even worse choices (the consensus approach seems to have worked much better for Google's Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page).

More specifically, there was a complete breakdown in horizontal, vertical, lateral, peripheral, and even collateral communication between all parties on the management team, leaving the downstream managers like the architect, the contractor, and various subcontractors to make decisions on their own. These field-level orders often resulted in costly order changes that our zero-entry system did not account for and that the management team discovered when we found out a creditor who hadn't been paid on time was threatening to take out a lien on our property.

5. Staffing
Our human-resources strategy was to approach the best in their fields, and when they turned out to be prohibitively expensive, hire anyone willing to do the job at our price point. The resulting head-count issues caused considerable delay in the project. Middle management itself was often unavailable and seemed completely uninterested in manpower issues—that is, when we were actually able to reach them on the phone. Staffing continues to be an area for improvement, and we intend to bring this up with our contractor when and if we ever see him again.