The Company Without Limits

Five years ago, Stuart Hornery and Malcolm Latham stood half a world away from home, at the lip of an abandoned limestone quarry about 20 miles outside of London. As they surveyed the barren landscape, the two men didn't see one of Europe's industrial wastelands, a 240-acre chalk pit pocked with limestone holes and derelict cement works. Nor did they envision a traditional shopping complex of the sort that had been proposed for the site. Instead, they saw what any pioneer venturing into new territory sees: a chance to make an impact on the world, or at least one corner of it, by defying the limits imposed by conventional wisdom.

These two pioneers were ambitious executives: the chairman and the director of special projects, respectively, of Lend Lease Corp., Australia's leading real-estate company. For Hornery, 59, who has led the $6.3 billion company for more than half of its 41-year history, and for Latham, 62, who is known to Lend Lease's 4,500 employees as the company's "tribal elder," the quarry offered the chance to create a new kind of civic space -- one that would be more a community center than a shopping center. The design would not only provide state-of-the-art form and function; it would also create meaningful connections with the local culture. The landscaping would not merely decorate the area; it would also restore this part of Kent (a county known as the Garden of England) to its former green state.

These big ideas quickly gave rise to tangible action. Less than three weeks after that initial visit, Lend Lease signed a deal to take over the site that Blue Circle Industries, a British cement company, had been struggling to develop for eight years. Lend Lease inherited a preapproved development plan -- and then proceeded to scrap everything but the project's name: Bluewater. Hornery and Latham quickly set up camp in a rented office space in London and pulled in about half a dozen of the company's best retail, property, and project-management minds, along with Eric Kuhne, 47, an influential American architect.

This group was charged with fleshing out a dream brief; the result was a break-the-mold project charter called "The Bluewater Factors." Today, the former quarry is a jaw-dropping landmark: At once futuristic and mythological, Bluewater features a glowing-white roofscape that rises out of the chalk-hill basin like some once-and-future city excavated from limestone. It stands as one of the largest shopping complexes in Europe, with 1.6 million square feet of retail space, a 13,000-car parking garage, some 50 acres of parkland, seven lakes, and more than 1 million trees and shrubs (all imported from Germany). A sprawling triangle composed of three two-story malls houses 320 retailers from around the world. The Bluewater Factors permeate the place: The mall's "shopping streets" spill out onto the surrounding landscape, and each mall features a "leisure village" that integrates its shopping area with nearby recreational space. There are health clubs and restaurants, as well as a cinema complex. Welcome halls are outfitted like luxury hotels, complete with full-time concierge staffs.

Bluewater's scale was matched only by the speed of its completion. Lend Lease's 250-person development team, along with 40 contractors, countless subcontractors, and more than 20,000 construction workers, guided the project from initial conception to the final leasing stage in just 1,628 days. The project came in two weeks ahead of schedule, on budget, and fully leased. Since the grand opening of Bluewater, in March of this year, an average of more than 75,000 people per day have visited the complex.

Welcome to life at Lend Lease, a company that thinks impossibly big -- and then delivers reliably. "With Bluewater, we bought a piece of land in the middle of a property slump and launched the biggest project in the history of the company," says Latham, who, before joining Lend Lease in 1989, had helped develop Canberra, Australia's capital city (he was the head of Canberra's National Capital Development Commission). "We had the audacity to try to create something that had never been seen in Europe -- and the confidence that we could realize that dream. We have the skills required to build something from nothing." According to Hornery, "Every project we take on starts with a question: How can we do what's never been done before?"

Let's build something from nothing. Let's do what's never b been doneefore. These are the rallying cries of 21st-century competition. In an economy marked by more change than ever, more technology than ever, and more capital than ever, companies have more opportunities than ever. In the new economy, the only limits to growth are those of imagination and of execution. Lend Lease has turned transcending limits -- limits defined by industry, geography, or capability -- into a core competence. "We want to create things that are extraordinary, feasible, and valuable," says Ann McCallum, 31, an executive at Lend Lease Corporate Solutions and one of the company's most influential change agents. "Everything we do has to fit all three criteria."