What must be true of the workforce system for a capital decision to become a completed, operating asset?

An hourly rate prices time. An owner needs accepted work, a credible schedule, and an asset ready to operate. The Capacity To Build asks leaders to examine the capability, capacity, and coordination behind the promise to deliver.

Drawing on skilled-trades experience, public cases, and attributed research, Michael Shue examines how training, qualifications, career continuity, mobility, supervision, and risk governance influence execution. The analysis follows the work through safety, productivity, quality, commissioning, and operating readiness.

Test the workforce assumptions behind the investment.

Compare the full path to operation.

Look beyond hourly rates to realistic paid hours, accepted output, mobilization, rework, and the consequences of delays. Identify which assumptions could reverse the economic comparison.

Examine five connected workforce functions.

Assess capability, capacity, portability, mobility, and risk governance separately, then examine how supervision and owner readiness connect them to production.

Evaluate the system that actually exists.

Test building-trades institutions and strong open-shop contractors against the same project-specific requirements. Institutional labels do not substitute for evidence of available people, qualified supervision, and workable coordination.

Bring workforce diligence into authorization.

Build a workforce case tied to the operating result. Give consequential assumptions an accountable owner, supporting evidence, a confirmation date, and a credible alternative if they fail.

The book includes 20 chapters, a project-review decision aid, a sample economic comparison, and source notes. Its frameworks support judgment; they are not validated prediction models.

For leaders whose decisions must hold through construction and operation.

Written for owners, capital-program leaders, contractors, labor leaders, workforce institutions, and public officials making decisions about construction, major modifications, and the transition into operation.

The central responsibility is shared: develop capability where it is missing, secure access where it exists, and coordinate the conditions needed to use it.

From the investment decision to the delivered asset.

Part One · Establishing the conditions for execution

Project economics, workforce infrastructure, the boundaries of the evidence, and the actual delivery system.

Part Two · Developing and mobilizing capability

Skill development, usable capacity, career continuity, and workers’ ability to reach and accept an assignment.

Part Three · Turning capability into accepted work

Supervision, owner obligations, disagreement, safety, productivity, the critical path, quality, commissioning, and total workforce economics.

Part Four · Testing the institutional choice

The strongest open-shop case, regional capacity, complex assets, and compressed operating windows.

Part Five · Making and renewing the capital decision

The workforce case for authorization and learning from the asset that was delivered.

Read an excerpt

From the introduction · “The decision before the work”

A project can have financing, a signed contract, a full procurement file, and a public completion date while those questions remain unresolved. The consequences emerge later, when changing the plan becomes expensive.

Michael Shue, The Capacity To Build

A perspective shaped by the work and the investment decision.

Michael Shue worked as a boilermaker and pipefitter, served as a union steward and instructor, and later held roles as site welding administrator, senior lead instructor, and maintenance manager. He subsequently took on senior leadership responsibilities for labor programs in power generation.

He earned an MBA from the University of Illinois Gies College of Business as a working adult. His trades experience and business education inform the book’s question: will the capabilities assumed in a plan be available when the work begins?

He is also the founder of The Workforce Current.

The views and analysis are the author’s own. The book is not affiliated with or representative of his employer or any other organization.

The Capacity To Build

Published November 1, 2026 · Available on Amazon

The Capacity to Build is available for purchase. Review the Amazon listings for current format, price, and delivery options.