High flyer: Mark Beck on building with Boeing

“If you ever hear somebody in India say, ‘We’ll get back to you’, that means no.”

Mark Beck is giving me a quick tutorial on courtesy in the huge and varied region he’s responsible for as Boeing’s global leader of real estate and facilities in India and Asia Pacific. His job is to oversee new offices, warehouses, hangars and manufacturing facilities from hubs in India, Singapore and Australia, where he’s called Queensland home since 2024.

“It’s kind of changed the way I look at how things are getting built. In the UK and Europe, it can all be the same because people have got a similar sort of mindset. But it’s amazing the differences between India and China and Japan and Australia. It’s unreal.


“So, India, I find quite hierarchical. They’re very conscious of people on more senior levels, and they don’t want to offend, so they find it hard to say no.

“If you’re in a meeting in Japan, you do not interrupt. You do not interrupt the other person at all because that starts breaking down trust and people go really quiet. The sensitivity around losing face is a very real thing.


“And in Australia, being such an isolated country, Australians like to be very independent. Everything’s about the relationship. If you’re not in with the in crowd, it’s a tough crowd, so you’ve really got to work hard at that.”

“In places like Japan and China, you’re always going to be seen as the outsider regardless – even if you’re in a senior position, so you’ve got to be very respectful of that kind of thing.”

Beck has been on two types of journey: one is physical and the other is his developing sense of how best to do his job.

The first journey took him from the UK to Brisbane. In 2017, he started working in the UK for CBRE as an associate director on the Boeing account before joining Boeing in 2019 as UK & EMEA project and construction management leader.

Then in 2023, he and his wife started planning a move to Australia to be closer to his wife’s family. Fortunately, his counterpart in the Asia Pacific region was moving home to the US, so there was a place still warm for him. He’s since been promoted to his current role.

The second journey is ongoing: achieving a deeper appreciation for what works in the business of project delivery, wherever you happen to be.

“I’ve done construction for a long time. I started in the 90s, when people were still banging tables,” he said. Now, he tries hard to listen.

That served him well in Australia, where the team he inherited had issues that needed working out over 18 months.

“You can’t go in throwing your weight around because everybody is so different. Instead, I think just listening to what people have to say is really important, what they actually need, and then coming back with real, tangible solutions. That’s what builds trust and, once you get the trust, people feel they’re being heard, and everybody starts working towards the common goal.


“That’s what I found is best. It’s certainly helped me in my career. I think my skill set is about building really good teams. I’m probably one of the more stupid ones on the team, but I’ve got excellent people who know what they’re doing and it helps everybody.”

This second journey has led him to do a master’s degree in construction project management at the University of Liverpool.

His dissertation, which was due just weeks away from when we spoke, has raised eyebrows. It’s on the development of emotional intelligence in construction.

“It’s a tough one because a lot of people have actually laughed at the title, saying ‘emotion’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘construction’ are three words you don’t often hear in the same sentence,” he said.

“But I had decided before I went into the masters that that’s what I wanted to write on anyway, mostly because I was doing a lot of reading about the failure rates in construction projects with delays and cost overruns, and I was quite surprised by the figures. So I thought, well, you know, what needs to be different? And that’s really what sparked my interest in all of that.

“It’s amazing how little research there is on emotional intelligence in construction. There’s lots of stuff about emotional intelligence in all business sectors, but hardly anything in construction. So that’s been the challenge.”