Voices of Design Leadership. Ken Sanders

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