some fundamental, deep changes. That was a difficult time because not everyone wanted the changes that we were making. And one of those was business performance. Perkins&Will was not a particularly fantastic business back in the day and people didn’t agree as to how to accomplish business success.
There were three camps. There was the camp that felt you had to choose between design excellence and business excellence, which Henry and I and others rejected. You can only be a great design firm if you’re a great business. You can focus only on design for a short period of time, but if you want long-term excellence, you have to also accomplish business excellence as well. Some people just had never experienced that. They said, well, we’re not good at business because we’re good at design. And we said, absolutely not, you’ll do better design if you do good business.
So that was one camp. There was another camp that believed that the path to business success was through command and control. Sort of old-school management: we’re going to tell you how to do this, you do what I say, and then we will be successful. And again, Henry didn’t believe in that; he believed in delegated leadership and collaboration and trust – the third camp. Henry didn’t go to business school, but it was more what most people would see as a modern, progressive, enlightened leadership model.
So because there were these three different camps, it took a while to bring along that first group, and they’re largely still here with us in the firm. The second group that wanted command and control largely are not with us anymore.
During that whole period under Henry, and then the first five or so years of my leadership, there was more internal stress in the organization than there had been in the last decade. It’s just so much easier doing my job when the people around you agree. It’s not like we agree with everything that it’s like a cult or anything like that. But we agree on the most important things. The general strategy of the firm, the general vision is 100% bought into. And with that you’re so untethered.
Every meeting is just that much more efficient when you have cultural alignment. You know what to do. And you leave the meeting and then you go do it. As opposed to, in the old days, we weren’t sure what to do, people weren’t really bought in, and no one would actually do what we said we were going to try to do. And that was extremely frustrating.
To me, one of the things I like best about my position – and I consider myself super lucky to be in this position – is that we actually do things. We don’t sit around complaining and wishing the world were different. If we want something to change, we just go change it. And that happens not months later; it happens the next day.
This idea of an action-oriented leadership is totally satisfying. And because of our leadership structure, we’re able to act like a small firm. We can make a decision and implement it immediately, which you couldn’t do if you were a publicly listed firm or if you had a million partners. The way we’re structured, we are able to decide and then do. That is both a more efficient and effective way to lead. It’s also more fun.
KS: With acquisitions, the cultural dimension is one of the most challenging. How have you dealt with that during your tenure at CEO?
PH: I’ve been involved in all of our acquisitions since 2000, which is about 25 or so, of different sizes. Most of them are on the small to medium side, you know, ten people up to maybe a hundred people. We haven’t acquired firms with hundreds of people. And partly for that reason we were able to take a very people-centric approach. Of course, we were interested in geography and talent and expertise. But we always found the people we felt would align with our culture.
And in the early days, when we weren’t so sure ourselves what our own culture and brand really were, it was harder to do that. We couldn’t explain what it meant to be at Perkins&Will and our brand was unclear. It was a little opaque, but we’ve become increasingly confident in who we are and what our brand represents, and our brand itself is stronger.
Now when we do an acquisition, people know who we are, and it’s much easier to achieve cultural alignment. In general, I think we’ve been successful because we took a people- and culture-centric approach. We didn’t always get it right. Sometimes we would convince ourselves to merge with a firm knowing it wasn’t totally aligned. That’s not a good idea. It’s just so hard to change culture compared to other things.
Generally, we’ve done quite well. In fact, today, if you look at our Board of Directors, almost everybody on the Board came into the firm through acquisition. Some people would say, well, that’s weird. But we don’t really look at acquisitions as that different from hiring people. It’s just a more efficient way to hire people. It would be different if we went and merged with Gensler or SOM or something like that, then yeah. Then you would see two completely different firms that you could trace – kind of like the Capulets and the Montagues3 – back to their particular cultural DNA.
That would obviously be much more complex, and we’ve never done anything at that scale. It was almost always people joining Perkins&Will and believing in what we believe in and already having the same values. It was quite easy for those firms and people to become citizens of Perkins&Will.
Also, importantly, whenever we acquired firms, we would always say, “Look, we’re not static. One reason we are who we are is because you’ve joined us and you’re going to change us.” You know, when Peter Busby joined us, we said, “Just because we’re not as green as you are, you shouldn’t stop being green. We want you to make us greener.” Which is what happened.
KS: That’s a great message. You want the firms you’re acquiring to influence and help shape the future of Perkins&Will.
PH: Yeah. It’s a humble approach because no one has all the answers. The whole point of an acquisition is sort of one plus one equals three. Both firms should get better, bigger, happier, all those things. And if you do that, then the business side of an acquisition makes tons of sense.
KS: As CEO, you have a series of client relationships, you still are engaged in some way with projects but not running them. How do you keep in touch with the work at Perkins&Will, to ensure the outcomes, the impacts, the quality are aligned with the mission and vision of the firm? How are you orchestrating that and how do you get visibility broadly across the firm?
PH: Through a number of ways. I mean, I’m just interested. Whenever I travel to other studios, I make a point of actually meeting with teams and sitting in design reviews and those kinds of things. I mean, I’m an architect and that’s my passion, at the end of the day. And I care about that more than any other aspect of the business, the people and the projects and the clients.
We also have a Design Board, and our Design Board does an annual design review of the entire portfolio. And I participate in that. That’s like a full weeklong process where we review lots of projects, and I present back to the firm what we see from the Design Board perspective. So that’s kind of an intensive way to stay in touch annually.
I’m also on our Research Board, which is the group that governs our investments in research. So I stay involved on the innovation front. I’m also on our Technology Board, which has been a long-term interest of mine. That is about what are we doing digitally in terms of innovation. These are some of the things I’m interested in the firm that I stay close to, or as close as I can.
One of the problems with my role – and this is probably true with a lot of management – is it’s easy to slip into a habit where all you do is fix problems. When there is a problem, you have to pay attention to it. But every time I attempt to fix a problem, I’ll turn around and say, well, what good is going on? How do I celebrate the good and get close enough
