The Company Without Limits

The company's track record over the past 41 years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Founded in 1958 by the Dutch socialist Dick Dusseldorp (whose initial goal was to build public housing in Australia's Snowy Mountains), Lend Lease has become a real-estate juggernaut of the first order. In 1959, it laid the foundation for Sydney's world-famous Opera House. Today, it is building the Newington Olympic Village, which will house more than 15,000 athletes and officials during the 2000 summer games, in Sydney. After the Olympics, the Newington facility will become a 225-acre residential community, complete with 2,000 apartments as well as houses, stores, schools -- much of it solar-powered. The company also has a 50-50 joint venture with Fox to build Fox Studios Australia. The facility's already-built world-class soundstages are booked years in advance: The Matrix, a cyberthriller starring Keanu Reeves, recently wrapped to make way for Mission: Impossible 2, starring Tom Cruise. The project also includes a "creative campus," which supports film and TV activities, and which will be integrated with a spectacular retail-and-leisure precinct that is set to open this October.

Real estate is where Lend Lease started -- but that is hardly where it remains. The company is one of the fastest-growing fund managers in Australia. Back in 1985, when Hornery and his colleagues acquired a musty, 98-year-old life-insurance company called MLC, the reaction was "Just what do real-estate executives know about insurance?" Lend Lease's answer was to mix actuaries with engineers, financial analysts with project managers, and to pioneer a low-cost model of providing retirement plans and investments. Today, MLC manages assets worth $20.4 billion and accounts for more than half of its parent company's total profits. Lend Lease has also become a leading player in the business-services industry: As a founding partner of IBM Global Services Australia, one of the largest it-services companies in the Asia-Pacific region, Lend Lease is staking out the market for e-business in the southern hemisphere.

Does all this diversity seem hard to swallow? Coca-Cola doesn't think so. Early this year, Lend Lease beat out several global players to become a strategic partner with Coke, charged with building all of the soft-drink maker's bottling plants in Southeast Asia. It is also designing Coke's new Sydney headquarters, managing Coke's 401(k) plan in Australia, and running the World of Coca-Cola museum in Las Vegas. The financial markets have registered their approval as well. Lend Lease shares have delivered a compound annual growth rate of 24% over the past 40 years. In the past year alone, the company's market value has increased from $5 billion to more than $6 billion.

The best indicator of Lend Lease's future growth prospects is its growing population of young talent. Put simply, Lend Lease is seen as the most exciting company to work for in Australia. The average age of its 3,200 Australian employees is 31. Roughly 40% of its people are less than 26 years old. "It's great to work for a winner," says Susan MacDonald, 35, a 12-year Lend Lease veteran, who serves as the company's asset-management director for Europe. "The buzz you get from Lend Lease is really what sets it apart. It's tremendous to be part of an organization that has a constant stream of wins but that doesn't sell itself down the river in the process. There's a purpose behind what we do."

Preserving that sense of purpose is the major challenge facing Stuart Hornery. "We face a daily struggle to maintain our core values -- to keep going against the tide," he says. "It takes leadership and confidence to keep going as an organization that dares to be different."

Bold Dreams, Master Plans

Malcolm Latham couldn't believe his ears. He was sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Sydney, listening to the American architect Eric Kuhne hold forth on how modern architecture had cheated society. Its elite theories and sterile styles, Kuhne argued, had stripped buildings, and even entire cities, of "the most essential ingredient of art: the ability to tell a story." In Kuhne's fervent appeal for a new "civic architecture," Latham heard echoes of some conversations that had been going on inside Lend Lease. For the leaders of that company, the future of the property business involved contributing to communities, creating robust human experiences, and designing new and better ways of working.

Kuhne's insights were blowing Latham's mind. He leaned over to his wife and whispered, "I have to meet this man," and the architect's sister, sitting nearby, overheard him. It took one meeting between Kuhne and Latham, and another meeting involving Hornery, for the three of them to strike a collaboration. But what should Kuhne and Lend Lease collaborate on? "We [Lend Lease] asked ourselves, Where are we most at risk?" recalls Latham. "Where do we want things to change, and how big is the jump we have to make?"