The Company Without Limits

Ask people at Lend Lease to describe the structure of the company, and they're likely to scratch their head, look up at the ceiling, and chuckle a bit before saying, "It's a mystery," or "It's an amorphous mess," or "It's a bloody tangle." But Lend Lease's people are very clear about the principles behind their organization. Most of them end up describing those principles in terms of a paradox: "We're extraordinarily disciplined," says Rosemary Kirkby, 49, general manager of people at MLC. "Our project-management process pushes people to deliver against very rigorous demands. Yet we have a very disobedient culture. We're a group of rule breakers. Everywhere you look at Lend Lease, there are tensions -- between creativity and discipline, between purpose and performance, between people and money. That's the power of this organization."

Project-control groups (PCGs) are the core mechanism through which Lend Lease blends out-of-the-box creativity with by-the-book accountability. Every major project gets a PCG, which functions like a frontline board of directors. Members of a PCG don't work on the project day to day, but they are accountable for it. One of the first challenges facing a Lend Lease project manager is to assemble a PCG with the best possible mix of mind-sets, skills, and experiences -- and that means including representatives of outside stakeholders. The PCG for Fox Studios Australia, for example, included the CEOs of Lend Lease and News Corp. Australia, as well as retailing experts, urban anthropologists, and film-industry executives from Los Angeles.

PCGs, which can include as few as 3 people or as many as 15, meet every six or seven weeks for the duration of a project. Unlike many board meetings, which are little more than high-minded gabfests, PCG meetings are serious business. Says Peter Scott, who has run two major business units at Lend Lease: "A PCG meeting has a rigorous agenda, a set of minutes, a financial review, and a dozen other reports on key aspects of the project. They are true stand-and-deliver sessions."

But PCGs are not just about meeting deadlines and making budgets. They are also designed to sustain the kind of active, big-picture questioning that gets lost in the heat of implementation. "We make better decisions and create better products because every time we walk into a PCG meeting, we know that we have to make a case for why we are doing something in the first place," Scott explains. "That means we're not afraid to stop things. We're brutal about pulling the plug and moving on -- even when we've already spent a lot of time and money on a project."

For that reason, diversity -- of members, of experiences, and of perspectives -- is crucial to a successful PCG. As the architect Eric Kuhne learned while working on the Bluewater shopping center, nothing is sacred in a PCG meeting: "The debates on Bluewater were legendary. People from wildly different backgrounds come to a PCG meeting ready to fight passionately for what they believe in. Nobody holds back. You can't build something new without stepping on what other people believe is the best thing that they've ever done."

Which is not to suggest that PCGs, by questioning assumptions, end up delaying action. "As a company and as individuals, we're highly disciplined, on the one hand, and highly creative, on the other," says Malcolm Latham. "If you sit in a PCG meeting, you'll see the group move from right brain to left brain and back again within 15 minutes. Members of a PCG can accommodate those switches. And that equals magic."

Kirkby has lived with those tensions every day for the past two years. Asked to investigate why the pace of improvement at MLC had slowed after some wildly successful change programs, she came up with an unsettling answer: "You're ignoring a mechanism of change that's right under your nose" -- namely, the building that served as MLC's headquarters. The structure in question was a North Sydney landmark, built in 1957. Its 12 floors had been chopped into drab executive offices and even drabber cubicle farms. There was already a plan on the table to refurbish the interior in the interest of cost reduction and rental savings -- in other words, to spend "$23 million for a couple of new chairs and a coat of fresh paint," says Kirkby. But she saw the potential for doing something far more ambitious. So she set about transforming what had originally been a property project into a "people project."

Her brief began with one word: "Imagine." It detailed a workplace of the future that would be built around the principles of community, flexibility, and collaboration -- a "vertical village" of 1,200 people rather than a sterile building with 12 floors. That was the dream. Next Kirkby had to face reality, in the form of the MLC board. "The budgeting process here is almost ruthless," she says. "You get used to hearing, 'You're not going to get this.' And you get very good at building a compelling business case for what you want to do." In this instance, she argued that reclaiming the building's "civic space" for collaborative-meeting areas and lifestyle zones, and blowing up the floor plan to create flexible work arrangements, would turn the building into a "strategic tool" to be used in the quest for young, skilled talent.