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Forward thinking: Michael Anastasio President and CEO of Bala Consulting Engineers (King of Prussia, PA), a multi-disciplined design firm with an environment designed for relationships to thrive and careers to flourish.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
A s president and CEO of Bala, Anastasio directs the company’s development, diversification, and growth strategies. With almost 40 years of engineering and firm leadership experience, he has developed solutions for engineering and operational challenges alike. He’s one of Bala’s founders and oversees the entire enterprise with a focus on strategic development and growth. “Consistent quality certainly helps build trust, but we also see project difficulties as an opportunity to build trust,” Anastasio says. “Confronting challenges head-on and giving them priority assures a client that you have their best interests in mind all the time, not just when things are going well.” A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ANASTASIO. The Zweig Letter: The firm was founded in 1982. What are some of the most significant changes you’ve seen (i.e., new technology, globalization, etc.)?
Michael Anastasio: As someone who has spent all of his career in the engineering industry, I’ve experienced a tremendous evolution with some significant inflection points. Technology has been the primary disruptor and has led to a globalization of the industry. I hate to date myself, but I did start in this profession before word processing and electronic calculating. Let us skip over those minor steps and look at computational automation in the form of programs like CADD, REVIT, BIM, and a host of other design-based programs such as energy modeling, short circuit analysis, and RAM. Clearly, the key inflection points were CADD and BIM – both highly dependent and transcendent of the internet. I leave out REVIT because it’s merely the bridge from CADD to BIM. These two platforms have and will continue to have the greatest impact on the AEC industry. When you look at the industry pre-CADD it looks totally archaic. To discuss it today with our “next-geners” is like talking about the Roman legions. The post-CADD era
THE ZWEIG LETTER JANU
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