Total Teamwork - SEI Investments

The first sign that there's something unusual about SEI Investments is its headquarters in Oaks, Pennsylvania, 30 minutes west of Philadelphia. On the outside, the five-building complex looks like a Playskool version of a commercial farm. On the inside, it feels more like a beehive. All the furniture is on wheels, so employees can create their own work areas. Colorful cables ("pythons") spiral down from 25-foot-high ceilings. They carry electricity, a dial tone, and Internet access - instant connectivity. So many people here move their desks so often that SEI has created software to map every employee's location.

"The buildings are a visual statement of who we are," says Al West, 55, SEI's chairman and CEO. "When you walk through here, you intuitively grasp 60% of our culture."

That culture is a striking contrast to the starched-shirt world - financial services - in which West and his colleagues compete. SEI manages or acts as administrator for $121 billion in assets, almost all of which are in mutual funds. It handles back-office operations for the trust departments at 85 of the top 200 U.S. banks. It runs an investment-advisory service for wealthy individuals.

Yet the company exudes a sense of bottom-up informality. The Oaks campus has no walls and no secretaries. And forget the org chart - the defining unit of operation at SEI is the team. Work is distributed among roughly 140 self-managed teams. Some are permanent, designed to serve big customers or important markets. But many are temporary: People come together to solve a problem and disband when their work is done.

The result is a workplace that's always on the move. "We call it fluid leadership," says West. "People figure out what they're good at, and that shapes what their roles are. There's not just one leader. Different people lead during different parts of the process."

SEI is on the move in the marketplace as well. Revenues in 1997 were nearly $300 million - up 30% from three years ago. Profits have grown even faster. This year, SEI shares have traded as high as $54, up from a low of $18 in 1997. The company's market value is approaching $1 billion.

It wasn't always this way. Alfred P. West Jr. founded Simulated Environments Inc. in 1968. Its first product was a computer-based simulation to train loan officers. The company quickly launched a range of outsourcing services for the financial industry. But even as SEI's business was growing, its business model was stagnating. The company was indistinguishable from other players in its industry. "Our divisions competed with each other more than they did with competitors," says West, an earthy native of Brooksville, Florida. "We were getting in our own way."

Then, in January 1990, West broke his leg in a skiing accident. He spent three months out of the office and used the time to think about the future. His conclusion: The company had to speed up its reaction time, innovate more quickly, get closer to its customers. And those changes demanded a reinvention. So the CEO returned to work and took a wrecking ball to the corporate pyramid. Two of SEI's three division heads quit; the third was fired. "We disenfranchised the upper-level people and enfranchised the lower-level people," West says. Next he eliminated SEI's phalanx of secretaries and told his managers to do their own typing, faxing, and travel planning. "That really broke the back of the old culture," he says.

SEI Investments moved into its new headquarters in late 1996. "The buildings are the capstone of the cultural change," West says. To reinforce this final break with the past, SEI declared that each employee could bring only two boxes of possessions to the Oaks campus. And there were no prearranged offices or floor plans. It was up to the teams to arrange things as they saw fit.

And to keep rearranging them. Earlier this year, SEI's investment sales and services group moved 100 desks in two hours. Henry Greer, 59, SEI's president and chief operating officer, describes the culture change this way: "We wanted to throw away any structure that would impede us from doing what was right for the business." Jeffrey Scherer, 49, a principal at Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle Ltd., the Minneapolis firm that designed the Oaks campus, puts it even more simply: "Every day, it's a new place."

Perhaps the first rule of teamwork at SEI is that there are remarkably few rules. Teams have as few as 2 members or as many as 30. Different teams are structured differently. Most employees belong to one "base team" and to three or four ad-hoc teams. These ad-hoc teams are what give SEI its sense of perpetual motion - and for new arrivals, they take some getting used to.

The biggest difference between SEI and traditional companies has to do with the nature of power. The only power here is the power of persuasion. No bureaucracy provides resources, no hierarchy issues commands. Your ability to get things done is a function of your ability to persuade colleagues to support you.