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Some jobs on which M-K and foreign workers were cooperating last week:
¶ In Turkey, 48 Americans and 1,200 Turkish laborers bulldozed the first earth-fill dam on a $14 million river-diversion project to control floods, irrigate 350,000 acres, and produce power.
¶In Australia, a handful of M-K supervisors hurried work on a $24 million irrigation project to widen the irrigation system channel north of Melbourne.
¶ In Colombia, a crew of villagers were using power shovels and scrapers to hack out an all-weather, 54-mile road to the sea through a mountainous area drenched by 300 in. of rainfall each year.
¶ In Mexico's Sonora valley, a dozen M-K foremen and engineers with a force of 800 Mexicans were building a dam to tame the erratic Mayo River, thus save 60,000 acres of rich farmland from periodic drought. The project will cost Mexico $5,600,000 but the government figures that MK's labors will result in new crops whose value each year will be more than the entire cost of the project.
All told, M-K last week was working on a grand total of 35 projects in twelve foreign countries, a construction effort of more than $498 million. It had 192 more jobs worth $412 million under way in the U.S. and its territories, including such projects as a $12 million air base at Portsmouth, N.H. and Boston's $12 million water tunnel under the Charles River.
"Spread the Risk." In MK's one-story Boise headquarters, Harry Morrison likes to point his finger at a wall map studded with pins marking MK's current jobs. "On that map," he says, "is summarized part of our basic philosophy. It's the philosophy of spread the risk. If you're losing on one job, take your loss, finish it on schedule and make it up on others, making damn sure you have others."
Harry Morrison always makes sure he has others. Besides his high devotion to his job, he has the ruggedness of a football tackle (an attack of Bell's palsy has not slowed him down) and the restlessness of a gypsy (he flies 150,000 miles a year). He also has the knack of handling men. "Guys walk into his office swearing they'll never go back to Brazil or Afghanistan," says an old M-K hand. "They come out treading air and acting as if they wouldn't trade places with God Almighty."
Morrison-Knudsen earned $5,761,000 last year, but Morrison seems to care little for personal wealth. Though he and his wife Ann own 22% of MK's stock (974,419 shares outstanding), he draws a salary of only $24,500 a year. The Morrisons, who have no children, have little social life. Once in a while, among friends, Morrison will take a sociable bourbon and ginger ale or plunk a guitar. When one friend remarked that he had "never heard Harry Morrison crack a joke," another friend added: "And I've never heard anybody crack a joke about Harry Morrison."
Morrison runs his company like a football coach with a four-platoon team. He has gathered together a staff of 5,000 men who know the business inside out, can operate efficiently 10,000 miles away from the Boise headquarters. He has bought entire companies to get a few top hands, pays them well (average $18,000 a year for a project supervisor), and tacks on bonuses for jobs well done.