The Company Without Limits

Fast Work, "Careening Careers"

How does Lend Lease manage to be consistently successful, even as it dares to be persistently different? The company's break-the-rules spirit is grounded in one back-to-basics insight: The best way to keep transcending your limits is to stick to a core discipline. At Lend Lease, that discipline is project management. "We don't just use project management on projects," says Hornery. "Project management is the way we go about our business. It's a strategic attitude that we all have."

Debbie McNamara, now 26, picked up her attitude as most Lend Lease recruits do -- in an intensive apprenticeship with an experienced project manager. In her case, that manager was someone responsible for developing MLC's relationship with the financial advisers who sell its products. About a year later, at age 23, McNamara was tapped to be a project manager in MLC's fund-management division. Her assignment: Work with the division's frontline call-center group to simplify business processes, to reinvent job descriptions, and to change attitudes. As the project moved into its final stages, McNamara packed her bags and headed to a new continent and to an entirely different business. As a retail-delivery manager on the Bluewater project, McNamara had 12 months to help 30 retailers make the transition from lease to grand opening.

Today, McNamara and her Bluewater peers are scattered around the world -- in part so that they can disseminate their knowledge and the benefits of their experience to new project teams. McNamara has had five jobs in as many years. "Lend Lease is comfortable with taking risks on people, so you make big leaps quickly," she says. "That's exciting, but it's also a little scary, because you end up with responsibility for a team of people and for serious results." But Lend Lease doesn't push people without providing a safety net as well. Says McNamara: "I learned two things on my first project: how to manage relationships, and how to manage risk. That has carried me through all of my projects."

In her career at Lend Lease, Susan MacDonald has had seven different roles. At age 28, for example, she went from managing a small shopping center to taking full responsibility for a 700,000-square-foot retail property. "The basic operating procedure here is that people don't stand on titles," she says. "They don't stand on position, and they don't stand on precedent. It's all about ideas. And it's all about credibility: How do you perform in the heat of a project? That's incredibly energizing -- and brutal. People either love to work for Lend Lease or absolutely hate it."

Peter Scott loves it. One afternoon nine years ago, he picked up the phone. A Lend Lease executive was on the line: "Come to our meeting tonight," he said. "There's an important announcement that's going to affect you." Scott showed up for what turned out to be a discussion about radically reorganizing the company's management structure: "Stuart [Hornery] sat at the table and said, 'Let me tell you what's going to happen: John's going here, Fred's going here, Jill's going to do this, and you're going to do that -- boom. We need to refocus, so I thought we'd just stir the place up.' People were moved from one area of expertise to another in an instant," Scott recalls. He was shifted from a job as head of one major project to a post that gave him responsibility for all projects. A year later, another Lend Lease executive came calling. David Higgins, 44, who is now the company's CEO, invited Scott to take over MLC. "This is a deliberate strategy," says Scott. "It's invigorating -- and it's also intimidating, because you're constantly being pushed outside your comfort zone."

Outside their comfort zone is where Lend Lease people spend most of their time. In place of a human-resources department and a series of career tracks, Lend Lease has a dynamic internal talent market that propels people into what Latham calls "careening careers." Lend Lease people zigzag through 5, 6, or even 10 distinct postings -- often in as many years. That pattern applies to the company's twentysomething up-and-comers, just as it does to elder statesmen such as Malcolm Latham, who arrived at Lend Lease to take a job as a "lowly project manager" on a residential development in North Sydney. A few years later, he found himself running the $2.6 billion General Property Trust, Australia's largest REIT (real-estate investment trust) -- even though he had no relevant experience. Latham was equally unprepared for his next job -- overseeing special projects in Lend Lease's financial-services division. Today, he plays mentor to the company's young project managers.