As Phil Harrison prepared to become the CEO of Perkins+Will Inc. earlier this decade, he discovered that the plan that had originally grown the company was now pulling it apart.
Throughout the 1990s, the architecture design firm underwent a growth strategy that included four acquisitions and the opening of three offices, but it hadn’t gone through a cultural alignment. It’s not that leadership hadn’t tried, but the firm’s leadership in the late ’90s was more passive, and there wasn’t confidence that they could effectively drive a cultural change.
“There were quite a few all-firm principal retreats, and we’d all go off to a nice resort for a few days and talk about this, and nothing would really happen with it,” Harrison says. “It took getting to a point where there had been a series of acquisitions, and we really felt like a surrealist painting where the head was on a different body. A good analogy is a Mr. Potato Head — it really felt like the parts were disconnected and didn’t add up to a whole.”
When he took over as president in 2003, the firm had, in just three years, done three more acquisitions, a merger and opened four more offices, and he still saw these cultural problems. At that point, the board of directors and firm leadership did not see the danger.
“Even though they were pretty high-performance people and were capable, the disconnect on the values side was very destructive,” says Harrison, who now serves as president and CEO. “It took us longer than it should have to recognize that.”
He knew he needed to lead a cultural change, so he set out to identify and communicate the firm’s values and then build on them through more acquisitions.
