Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ we immersed ourselves in companies with original, break-the-mold business strategies, we discovered an only-spoken-here strategic language, a vocabulary of competition designed to capture what the company stood for and how its people worked together to advance its agenda.

      Go back to Austin, Texas, and Roy Spence’s ad agency, a creative place to be sure, but a hard-nosed competitor as well, one whose clients include some of the world’s most powerful companies and best-known advertisers. As we’ve seen, Spence believes that his agency’s purpose-based strategy is distinctive enough that his bustling firm, with annual billings of $1.5 billion, needs an executive with the title “Chief Purposologist.” (She is, in some respects, GSD&M’s version of Cranium’s “CHIFF Champion.”)

      But that title is just a tiny part of the agency’s strategic vocabulary, and that vocabulary is what keeps new generations of employees connected to the 35-year-old agency’s original and unwavering purpose. Spence’s colleagues have gathered a collection of “Royisms” that they believe define how GSD&M operates—the genetic code for the agency’s competitive spirit. “We are curious and restless—a safe haven for misfits that somehow fit here,” reads one. “We like who we are. We like people who like us. When people come in to change our core culture, the body rejects them,” reads another. “We are not like the big boys, and we don’t want to be,” reads a third. “We must never play by their rules—it’s a trap.”

      Expressive language, to be sure. But where GSD&M’s business vocabulary most comes to life is in the design and personality of the agency’s headquarters building. If what you think shapes how you talk, the logic goes, then where you work should reflect how you think as well. Spence and his colleagues are true believers when it comes to the power of disruptive business ideas, and their beliefs are evident the moment you arrive at the GSD&M offices. The strikingly original facility, called Idea City, has become a defining landmark of the Austin business scene and a source of fascination among business commentators around the world. Nothing about the place is standard-issue office building. The three-story, 137,600-square-foot headquarters is overflowing with offbeat art and wild decor. There’s also a movie theater, a classic diner, and a bookstore.

      But the most telling aspect of Idea City is that it is actually organized as a city—on the theory that the energy, diversity, and barely controlled chaos of urban environments produce the most exciting ideas. The complex is divided into districts, each of which has its own personality. There’s the Financial District, where the agency’s business types congregate. There’s Greenwich Village, where the agency’s creative types work. Each major client gets its own neighborhood, sort of an immersion zone for the company’s products, personality, and purpose. There are War Rooms, Hot Shops, Idea Teams—ways of describing how and where people work that are unique to GSD&M.

      In the middle of it all is the Rotunda, the town square through which the 540 residents of Idea City pass on a daily basis. (Company wags call it the Roytunda, an homage to their silver-tongued president.) And on the floor of the Rotunda, written in concrete, are the values that animate the agency: community, winning, restlessness, freedom and responsibility, curiosity, integrity. These words appear in plenty of other places at GSD&M headquarters as well—the building is overflowing with visual reminders of what makes the agency tick.

      Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve. Why does GSD&M carve its values into the floor? “It sounds hokey, but it’s not,” explains Spence. “People understand that these values are not temporary. They are literally etched in the concrete of the town square. Those values are the common drivers of our purpose. People want to work at companies that know what they stand for. Everybody at this company knows what we stand for.”

      WHAT IT MEANS TO SUCCEED—BUILDING THE FUTURE BY REBUILDING AN INDUSTRY

      It’s a long way from Austin, Texas, to Redwood City, California, and there’s a vast gulf separating the freewheeling spirit of the ad business from the backbreaking demands of the construction business. But when you walk into the offices of DPR Construction, Inc., and visit with cofounder and president Doug Woods, it feels like you’ve traveled 1,800 miles to arrive at another Idea City—and another company that speaks its own language.

      Doug Woods doesn’t sound like a nail-pounding, lunch pail–toting construction boss. But he’s spent his entire career building office complexes, high-tech factories, and research labs. DPR’s enviable track record of success (it generates annual revenues of more than $1.5 billion and wins raves from construction industry gurus as a best-in-class operation) has been driven by an explicit commitment to re-building an out-of-date, dysfunctional sector of the economy. From day one, DPR has embraced the power of strategy as advocacy: it aspired to grow as a company by becoming a disruptive force in its industry.

      “This industry hasn’t changed the way it does business a whole lot in the last hundred years,” says Woods, sitting in the Patsy Cline conference room at company headquarters. (DPR headquarters, which exudes the slick feel of its Silicon Valley neighbors, is filled with rooms named after pop-culture notables.) “From the very beginning, we wanted to be quantifiably different and better. We wanted to be a truly great construction company.”

Indeed, back in 1990, before Woods and his cofounders, Peter Nosler and Ron Davidowski (the “P” and “R” in DPR), hammered their first nail, they hammered out a “core ideology” designed to set them apart from their peers—and to announce their intention to challenge convention in their industry. “We exist to build great things,” the ideology declares. “We must be different from and more progressive than all other construction companies. We stand for something.”*

What DPR stands for is an approach to the business that takes on and remedies some of the most notorious pitfalls of construction, the designed-in headaches that give the industry such a bad name: unreliable price estimates, endless cost overruns, delays and slipped schedules, completed projects with a never-ending list of fixes, and lawsuits and recriminations between builders and clients. Woods and his colleagues have been unblinking in their critique of what’s gone wrong with the industry to which they have devoted their professional lives. They have also made it clear that they would not look to the powers-that-be in their industry for ideas or inspiration about how to fix what ailed the business. “We’ve tried to emulate some of the high-tech companies and what propelled them,” Woods says. “Silicon Valley has been a proving ground for people who created new ways of doing business. That’s what we wanted to do in construction.”4

      Little wonder, then, that DPR, by virtue of its technology-inspired approach to the business, has become the contractor of choice for many of the country’s technology darlings. For example, it built Pixar Animation Studio’s lavish headquarters, the dream factory where Steve Jobs and his colleagues turn out blockbusters like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. It has built big corporate campuses for some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. It has built vast computer-chip factories across the country. And it has become a leading force in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, building offices, laboratories, and state-ofthe-art manufacturing complexes. These are all buildings that require fierce attention to detail, have huge budgets, and allow no margin for error. For Charles Schwab, DPR built a mission-critical data center inside an existing building while stock-trading operations continued on the floor above. For Motorola, it built a state-ofthe-art semiconductor plant in Austin, Texas, without interrupting operations at the other ultrasensitive chip lines that surrounded the new factory. For Pixar, it transformed the site of a run-down Del Monte cannery into an exquisitely stylish filmmaking complex that is downright breathtaking in its blend of high-tech wizardry and quirky personality. (We’ll visit the Pixar complex for other reasons in chapter 11.)

      DPR didn’t just build its business (and these buildings) in accordance СКАЧАТЬ