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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Feature: January 2006
The Miyamoto Way
Engineering is logic.
Story by Douglas Curley
Engineering is logic. It’s black and white.
However, according to H. Kit Miyamoto, logic can be applied creatively in many development disciplines.
“It’s an interesting dichotomy,” says the 42-year-old president and CEO of Miyamoto International Inc. “On one hand, you have to be creative and offer your own performance-based solutions to a specific situation. On the other hand, those creative solutions have to be based on sound engineering principles: logic and physics.”
Headquartered in West Sacramento near the Port of Sacramento, Miyamoto International is a structural and earthquake engineering firm with a portfolio that includes Fortune 1000 firms from around the world. According to Kit, the company is currently involved with more than 50 high-rise projects (including the proposed Saca Towers project on Capitol Mall), each with 50 or more floors.
This represents incredible business growth and international acclaim for a Sacramento-area architectural engineering firm that was first established in 1946. When Kit joined in 1989, the company was known as Marr Shaffer & Associates. It had one office. Kit became the eighth employee. He officially took over the firm from his mentor, the recently deceased John Shaffer, in 1997. Today Miyamoto International has 80 employees and five offices, including one in Tokyo.
Kit credits this growth to a company-wide commitment to quality service, relationship-building and a very aggressive marketing program.
“Back in the ’80s the firm made a major move into the structural/earthquake engineering sector. We wanted to become the best in this discipline,” Kit says. “As of today we have done more than 80 percent of the seismic earthquake retrofits that have been
completed on old buildings in the Sacramento area.”
Interaction with clients and other contractors in the seismic arena helped position the company to be considered for larger, new building projects — such as the Money Store’s ziggurat building in 1997.
“Many people have helped us along the way, but none more than E.M. Kato. He was the architect for the Money Store project. He pushed very hard for us to get the structural engineering contract. We wouldn’t have got it if not for his insistence.
“As we have grown into being a so-called international firm, we have also retained 100 percent of our local clients. In fact, I believe with our growth has come better service,” Kit continues.
He cites 20-year customer Boulder Associates as an example of not only retention but also growth.
“We have a long history of working with Boulder on healthcare facilities and hospitals throughout the Sacramento area,” Kit says. “But today, with our additional offices, they are doing business with us throughout the state.”
With a business plan built on seismic retrofit expertise, Kit has since positioned the firm to take advantage of the expected regional high-rise explosion. Miyamoto International purchased the Los Angeles engineering firm Martin & Huang in 2002. This immediately gave Kit and company high-rise expertise.
“By adding this group of professional specialists to our team, we also absorbed another very large and loyal client business.”
Kit quickly identifies three projects that are a direct result of this merger of dedicated minds.
“Thanks to the Martin & Huang acquisition, we currently have a $100 million, 22-story high-rise under way in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, an $800 million underground station for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and [we] just finalized the deal for a 50-story condo building in Las Vegas.”
And that, according to Kit, is just the beginning. “Many structural engineers market to specific sectors of the industry, but we market to everybody, everywhere.”
Miyamoto International’s marketing targets include architects, developers, contractors and landowners. The firm offers regional, statewide and national services for office buildings, retail outlets, warehouses and industrial tilt-ups. The company markets directly to China’s central government. It has an office in Tokyo that markets throughout Southeast Asia. It just opened an office in San Francisco and regularly meets with companies throughout the world.
“We currently have representatives in New York City meeting with Fortune 500 companies regarding their individual-portfolio risk assessment,” he explains. “We’re helping these companies determine an engineering risk assessment on their portfolio of properties.”
Through this assessment process, Miyamoto is able to offer recommendations on how to best fix portfolios — through insurance products and retrofit programs.
“This risk-assessment expertise is just one more tool we bring to the table for our clients and for our project partners,” Kit says. “We don’t look at ourselves as only being engineers on a project. We believe we our expert consultants that are an integral part of a building team.”
it’s ascension to the helm of an international architecture and engineering firm is also a story of logic and creativity, deep-rooted tradition and a desire to be different. Born on Jan. 23, 1963 in Tokyo, Kit says he never felt like he was going to be a good fit for restrictive Japanese society.
“As a high school graduate my view of the working world was [that] they all worked 100 hours a week, never took a vacation, never changed directions. There was so much tradition. You had to follow it in a certain way or be deemed an outcast,” he explains. “I was looking to live my life differently, so I had to find something else to do, somewhere else to go.”
His personal and professional sojourn was inspired by a Dallas Cowboys football game. “I had never played American football before, but one day I found myself watching the Cowboys on TV and thinking, ‘I can do that. I’m going to go to America and become a running back for the National Football League.’”
Since there was no Internet at the time, Kit headed for the library to research college programs. He applied to many and was accepted at Butte College. He promptly left his homeland, arrived in Chico as a stranger in a strange land, turned out for football, made the team, ran track, made friends. Then he blew out his knee.
“My dream of being a football player was now over, so I decided structural engineering would be the next best thing to do,” he recalls.
Kit’s father has spent his entire career with a Japanese utility company. Much of what the elder Miyamoto is responsible for is the construction of power plants and dams.
“I was always interested in the logic and physics of building power plants,” Kit says. “I liked logic and physics.”
He also enjoyed the social life of an American college. After two years at Butte, he transferred to Chico State. During his six-year tenure at the college, he joined a fraternity, served as a resident assistant in an on-campus dorm, worked as a firefighter for the California Department of Forestry, and did a little gold mining on a small claim in the middle of nowhere along Highway 49.
That’s how I made my tuition,” says Kit of the gold-mining experience. “I wanted to experience everything I could while at Chico State. You have to remember that back in 1987 the campus had been named the No. 1 party school by Playboy magazine. I was in no hurry to leave.”
No longer a frat boy, Kit is now a nationally respected expert on seismic energy dissipation. He lectures and publishes internationally on the subject of advance seismic resistive design.
He has published more than 50 white papers and received numerous awards for his contributions to the engineering industry. His commitment to remaining on the cutting edge of structural and earthquake engineering runs throughout the firm.
“It is really important to stay on top of the game, no matter what field you are in,” Kit explains. “Think about it. If you have cancer, when you go to see your doctor you hope he’s the world’s best. Same thing applies to our customers here. They invest millions of dollars into their buildings. They expect their engineers to be the world’s best.”
To achieve this lofty goal, Kit says he and his staff serve on numerous national and international technical code and standard committees. They participate in international conferences and have extensive discussions with university researchers from all over the world.
Kit cites the firm’s involvement in FEMA’s National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program as a case in point of Miyamoto International’s commitment to staying abreast of industry standards and codes.
“We serve on the code committee for the American Society of Civic Engineers. As such, we are participating in the writing of regulations for new buildings,” he explains. “These regulations become part of the California Building Code in 2006, and then the source document for the new International Building Code.”
With this hands-on involvement in the writing of new codes comes a thorough knowledge of how to apply them in all circumstances.
“A code is really meant to be used on usual buildings in usual circumstances,” Kit says. “But once you get into a super high-rise building or an underground construction project, you won’t design right if you try to apply the code sentence by sentence.
“There is a need for some interpretation,” he continues. “So what we do is not just follow the code, but also apply what we call ‘performance-based engineering.’ In layperson terms, this means we commit to understanding exactly how a structure behaves or performs through the use of computer simulations and international research.”
That insight, insists Kit, is why Miyamoto International is able to be creative. “Physics allows you the opportunity to offer many creative options and the ability to do many interesting things. Our involvement with the code-writing committees provides us with a solid knowledge of the building code. That knowledge enhances our ability to be creative.”
It applies his work ethic of blending logic and creativity to his life as well. “Without balance, life is boring,” he says. “I believe family, career, health and spiritual belief are all part of that balance. With those four things you have a great foundation; without them you can’t go very far.” It has always been Kit’s goal to go places and do “unusual things.” It drove him to leave his homeland when he was an 18-year-old high school graduate.
“When I was a kid, I decided I was going to use up every single DNA I have in my body. That’s the pledge I made. I live like today is the last day I have to live. That way, if something unexpected happens tomorrow, there are no regrets.”
