The Company Without Limits

In her seven years at Lend Lease, Ann McCallum has shifted jobs at least as many times as Latham has. Recruited out of the University of Sydney's graduate architecture program, she spent a year as a site engineer in Lend Lease's interiors-construction business. Then she took on a series of project-management roles in that same line of business. Soon she was tapped to organize the massive relocation of Lend Lease's far-flung Sydney-based businesses into a central headquarters -- and in that capacity, she got to know a wide range of the company's leaders. Meanwhile, McCallum got involved in the company's Youth Council, a group of under-30 employees (now called Genesis) that helps foster personal development and networking. She took up the group's campaign to create more robust feedback mechanisms at Lend Lease. Indeed, she made such a pest of herself that David Higgins, who was then the head of the company's property group, invited her to work on creating a performance-appraisal system. "I was the young turk among senior people who were developing feedback mechanisms," says McCallum. Just 18 months later, she was asked to join the board of the Lend Lease Foundation, a business unit dedicated to employee development; soon afterward, she signed on as the foundation's CEO.

The pace of change at Lend Lease doesn't simply shake up individual employees -- it strengthens the whole organization. "Change keeps you humble," says Peter Scott. "It keeps you from assuming that you're the sole expert because of your position or job title. Most important, it forces you to seek help and to share knowledge. If you don't involve people, if you set yourself up as a bottleneck, this organization will go around you."

The first thing that Scott did when he arrived at MLC, in 1996, was to hand over the job of setting strategy to the people who did the actual work: "I went around to all the 27-year-olds and said, 'I've been here a week. I have to write a business plan in three weeks. Get four teams together and come up with a plan that says what you think we should do with the company.' " In short order, the teams drafted a business plan for MLC. "We were a very big fish in Australia," says Scott. "But our real competition was, and is, global: Vanguard, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch. The teams put up a bunch of charts that said, 'Sell this, sell that, do this and not that.' And that's exactly what we're doing today." MLC set some ambitious goals -- including a 40% reduction in overall costs. Says Scott: "The process gave us the tools and the courage to do things that were once seen as sacred cows. Everyone said, 'There's no way you can do a 40% cost reduction.' Well, we did it -- and it involved a radical rethink of how we do business. In the process, we increased funds under management by 30%, and we increased productivity by two-thirds."

Another benefit of the MLC change program: a corps of young project managers who are poised to take their experience and their skills into new corners of the organization. Scott sent one 31-year-old woman, who ran a chunk of MLC's process redesign, to transform MLC's Indonesian operations. "People talk about globalization," he says. "Well, here's a young woman who enlisted people at the front lines to change this overseas office into a true branch of Lend Lease. When you go there today, it's like walking down the hall here. Not only did she replicate how we do business; she overcame cultural biases relating to age, seniority, and gender. We've developed a powerful system: It doesn't matter who you are or how old you are -- we give people responsibility and then say, 'Take a risk.' "

The real power of that system is the way it enables change to cascade through the ranks. Lend Lease has very few formal layers of management or administration, so its talent network has little excess capacity. The only way for people to ensure their mobility is to become adept at building teams, at pushing their peers, and at creating a robust network of connections. "If you don't prepare the person sitting beside you to take your job, then you're limiting your career," says Scott. "If we can't pull you into something new because you're mission-critical to what you do now, then you won't get to move. That's where our efficiency and our performance ethic come in: People want to move. People get into something, do it, and then move on."

Lend Lease's focus on work over structure, on ideas over status, makes business sense, says Stuart Hornery. "It's no longer radical to say that the only limit on growth is people. The difference here is that we've always acted on the belief that if you put limits on people, you've already lost the game. People don't raise the bar because management tells them to. They raise the bar because that's an exciting way to work."

Big Ideas, Small Details