The Company Without Limits

So Latham and Hornery asked Kuhne -- a former city architect for Fort Wayne, Indiana and the leader of an international consulting firm that focuses on the integration of architecture, landscape, and urban planning -- to take over phase one of Darling Park, the largest commercial oceanfront development in Australia. The $1 billion project featured two office towers, a hotel, and a series of vast public areas abutting Darling Harbour, one of Sydney's leading tourist destinations. Kuhne's challenge was daunting: to connect three massive towers, all designed by Harry Seidler (Australia's top modernist architect), with a people-friendly public space. His commission from Lend Lease was simple: Do something different to create a world-class work-and-leisure environment.

Doing something different at Lend Lease starts with creating something called "the brief." On January 26, 1991 -- Australia Day (the national holiday) -- not long after their initial meetings, Hornery, Latham, and Kuhne met to develop the brief for Darling Park. They dreamed up innovations in landscaping, workplace design, and labor relations. The result: a celebrated civic space that features vast gardens and pocket parks, all of them lushly landscaped with indigenous flora and fauna. Cleverly designed pedestrian bridges and other forms of human-scale infrastructure connect downtown Sydney with Cockle Bay Wharf, a vibrant restaurant-and-shopping precinct bordered by a fig-tree-lined promenade. The office lobbies and public spaces resemble those of a great hotel -- with plush leather sofas and chairs, warm rugs, espresso bars, and concierge services. Offering phones and computer hookups, these spaces have become destinations not only for people who work in the towers but also for Sydney's residents.

While building Darling Park, Lend Lease also tackled the dysfunctional relationship between development companies and Australia's heavily unionized construction workers. Job opportunities in construction are generally limited to those with specialized skills. It's nearly impossible, for example, for a carpenter to acquire the skills and the accreditation needed to get a job as a carpet layer. The Darling Park team came up with the idea of "skills passports" -- documents that workers could use to cross the boundaries created by labor regulations. Darling Park workers could shuttle among Lend Lease jobs throughout Australia, apprenticing in new skills -- and getting a stamp in their passport for each job. By the end of the project, most workers had been trained in as many as four different trades. This program not only enhanced the workers' prospects; it also generated goodwill toward what could have been a contentious project.

According to Latham, the audacious thinking behind Darling Park is typical of how Lend Lease does business: "If you went back to our original brief, it would be revealing in the sense of going beyond what had been done before -- and instructive in terms of showing how our system works." Latham sketches a graph to explain that system. The vertical axis represents value; the horizontal axis represents time. A line rises sharply from the starting point and then flattens out. Latham draws a vertical line through the peak of the curve. The region to the left of the line, he says, is the "dream-creation zone": "Most value is created at the beginning of a project -- in the first six months of a large property project, for example. As time goes on, you get fewer and fewer big leaps in innovation. But innovation is very possible if you start with a dream. That's how every project at Lend Lease starts."

There's another graph that's popular inside Lend Lease. It gets displayed at every strategy meeting and at every leadership conference. This graph depicts two curves. The top one, which ramps up quickly, represents the company's annual growth target of 15%. The bottom one, which is less steep, depicts the actual business forecast. The space between the two lines is called "the gap" -- or, more colorfully, "the jaws of death." "Our challenge is to double this business every five years," says Peter Scott, 45, who has run two units at Lend Lease -- first Civil & Civic, the original construction company, and now MLC, the financial-services business. "That kind of challenge stops people from playing incremental games. This place is fundamentally different today from what it was five years ago. That's why it's a great place to work."