Читать книгу Voices of Design Leadership - Ken Sanders - Страница 38

Ken Sanders: Phil, congratulations on your 15th anniversary as CEO. You joined Perkins&Will in 1993, is that right?

Phil Harrison: I joined Nix, Mann and Associates in '93, which was then acquired by Perkins&Will in '95. I was grandfathered in, back to '93. I mean, there’s always this question of longevity and tenure when firms merge.

KS: And when Perkins&Will acquired that practice, were you part of that conversation?

PH: Indirectly. I’ve got an interesting history there. If you know Hugh Hochberg,¹ he tells this story and you may have even heard this story. He claims a lot of credit for my career, which he probably deserves.

In the spring of ‘95, at a Partner’s retreat of Nix, Mann and Associates, they were struggling with leadership succession planning. They had realized at the time that they had wonderful people as Associates, but not the future leaders – the people to replace themselves. Which is a common situation, a classic second-generation problem.

And Hugh convinced them to take a bold step, which was to remove the Associate titles from the Associates – I think at the time about eight people – and to appoint two partners-in-training, myself and one other person. That happened in early ‘95. They went on a ski trip and came back and that was a pretty seismic event. I had just been designated into this weird new role of PIT, or partner-in-training, which people laughed about. It sounded like training pants or diapers or something like that.

Not that long after that tumultuous moment, which ruffled quite a few feathers, Perkins&Will came and proposed to acquire the firm. I was not an owner, but I’d been thought of as a future leader. Because of that situation, the two main partners, Henry and Lewis, came to me and said what do you think about this idea? We don’t want to do this if you and the other partner-in-training don’t think it’s a good idea. If you think it’s a good idea, we think it’s a good idea. We’d like to sell to Perkins&Will. So I was in consultation, but I really had no vote because I wasn’t an owner.

KS: And then a decade later you were invited to become CEO, right?

PH: It was a two-stage acquisition. The first stage was a 51% and the second stage was 49%. And for the first five years, not very much happened. But in 2000, once they finished the second stage, Henry Mann was appointed CEO of all of Perkins&Will. Once he became CEO, I took over the leadership of our Atlanta studio. And then he appointed me President in 2003 and then CEO in 2006. When he became CEO, he said “I’m going to do this for five or six years, but I plan to retire and you need to take over when I’m done. So just watch everything I do.”

KS: So you knew five years before you would take over that role. You had a chance to shadow him, watch him, learn from him.

PH: Yeah. It was quite an intense five- or six-year period because Henry was a wonderful leader and a very charismatic person, but also sort of a seat-of-the-pants kind of a manager. I wouldn’t call him impulsive, but he would make quick decisions, for example calling me late the night before saying, “Phil, just so you know, we’re going to Minneapolis tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up at 6:15 to catch the early flight.” And it’s a day trip, you know?

It was an exhausting internship, if you will, because of Henry’s work style, and I had young kids at the time. Those were challenging years, but I learned a ton from him. It became more evident to other people that I would succeed Henry as time went on. It took some years for that to happen, but he told me “just follow what I’m doing and you should take over after me.”

KS: Now you’re leading one of the largest practices in the world, you’re 25 offices in seven countries. I am sure the demands for your time outstrip the supply. How do you prioritize? What are the activities and impacts that you focus on in your role as CEO?

PH: That’s a good question. I have found – increasingly as my career has gone on – that I have more available time and partly that’s by design, because I realized I’m simply not as effective if I’m overbooked. It would be easy for me to travel every day and speak at conferences every week and go to all these at meetings, etcetera, etcetera. I could be a workaholic. But I would be miserable and I would probably die of a heart attack or something.

I also took on the job at a relatively young age, I’m 56 now. And I became CEO when I was 41, which surprised a bunch of people on the AIA Large Firm Roundtable. They were like, who’s this kid? And all those firms are now doing leadership succession now or have in the last couple of years, but no one was doing it back then. And I realized I’m going to have to do this for a long time. And I can’t do it the way Henry did it, which was fast and intensely.

I’ve always tried to pace myself and that was just an important life goal. Because I realized I wouldn’t be happy any other way. And as the firm has evolved, my job has changed. It’s been important to be in touch with what the firm needs of me and what it doesn’t need of me. And the firm has evolved quite radically in my time in leadership at the firm. A 400-person firm is very different than a 2,200-person firm, in terms of the structure and the organization and how you can delegate and those kinds of things.

I see it as three different chapters, and each one was quite different in terms of my job and focus. The first was the leadership succession period with Henry, which was the learning phase, super intense, running all over the place, on-the-job training.

When Henry retired, in the early years when I was on my own – this was the second phase – I was more involved in the financial management of the firm than anything else. I’d come into my role through operations and managing a large studio, and that was my comfort zone. And it was more of a straight business kind of a management role, and also what the firm needed at that time. I probably didn’t do enough on people and organizational leadership.

As time has gone on, most of the financial management has been delegated to a great CFO and a great COO and most of anything technology related has been delegated. What’s left – the third phase – is pretty much communications, strategy, and people. So today, I concentrate on vision and mission, and on our clients.

I’ve never been like, let’s say, Brad Perkins,² the other Perkins in our industry. Brad is a remarkable leader, but he does everything, and he spends a huge amount of time with clients and drives all their largest projects. I’m involved with clients from a high-level standpoint, but I don’t have my own projects that I’m running as a Managing Principal. That just hasn’t been what I’ve done. My role is much more of a servant leader, setting up the other people in the firm to function in that capacity.

I talk to clients on a regular basis, major clients, those kinds of things, but they don’t expect me to show up every week. Most of my role is management and organizational leadership. So the role has changed over time. And I think that’s been one important thing for my longevity. If I were still doing the exact same thing, it would have been tedious in a sense. Changing kept my role interesting, but also I think the firm needed different things from me over the years and I’ve tried to pay attention to what the organization needed.

KS: So early on you were focused more on financial issues, business operations, and you’ve since transitioned into communication, organizational leadership, vision, and mission. And you have a whole different kind of team surrounding you now, enabling you to do what you do.

PH: That’s right. And increasingly the people in key leadership positions around me are more like-minded. It’s been easier for the personal relationships that make the company function. There’s less organizational stress, I would say.

The other key thing that happened during Henry’s tenure was a period of time when Perkins&Will had to make 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 to know what’s happening?

That means I am familiar enough with the aspirational qualities of the work or the beauty in the architecture or the happiest clients. One of the things we do is survey all of our clients every year in a micro survey called Plus. It’s basically a customer satisfaction survey, asking our clients if they’re happy.

If there are clients that were unhappy for some reason, I personally talk to them. I’ve done that for about five or six years and I’m still doing that. But one of the things I told myself last year is I’m going to start calling the absolute happiest clients. What are we doing right? And both sides are really quite interesting. You know, we’re sort of introverts in our industry. We’re worried that clients are going to be unhappy with our work in some ways. We’re kind of shy about that.

Architecture and interior design and planning are the most joyful acts. It’s like a form of creation and we should be very confident with our clients and bold and form relationships that lead to trust and good things happening. We shouldn’t be shy to ask them how they feel about our work. If there’s one little point of pain in a relationship, it can turn into a snowball. And all you had to do was ask early on.

KS: In terms of the firm’s projects, can you identify two or three that you think are particularly meaningful, that hit all the right notes in terms of the firm’s purpose or went far beyond what the client thought possible?

PH: Yeah. One recent project was the Gardner Neurosciences Institute for University of Cincinnati Health. One thing I really love about that project is it relied on some of the research that was coming out of our Human Experience (Hx) Lab, which was basically taking human factor design neuroscience and incorporating that into the actual design process. And it resulted in a building for neuroscience research that was just a better building.

There was plenty of healthcare expertise and lab and clinical expertise that went into it that was more normative, but then there was this extra layer of human experience design, which had to do with thinking about light and acoustics, which actually then impacted the design of the building envelope, which has this kind of diaphanous veil on it, because it was a light control thing. People with brain trauma have different reactions to light.

To me, that’s just a really compelling project that relates to this next order of design innovation through thought leadership and just resulted in a really successful client experience. And everyone just loves that project. I mean, if we can love the spaces that we occupy, so many good things can happen. If architecture is just the sum of the parts, that’s depressing because bricks and mortar are just going to cost more and more every year. It’s just going to be more and more expensive bricks or more and more expensive mortar. But if it’s about the performance and the inspiration of the occupants of the building, that’s almost something that you can’t put a price on.

Canada’s Earth Tower, that’s not built yet, will be the tallest timber building in the world. It will be a forty story, residential, timber building. And the reason for that and why it’s called Earth Tower is carbon capture, and just thinking differently about material selection. Again, it’s not built yet; it’s caught up in some zoning issues in Vancouver not because of its material, but because of where it is the city. But I believe it will get built in time.