Jeff Holcomb, a senior manager for Trammell Crow, a Dallas commercial real estate developer with an office in Wayne, says SEI went at its corporate flexibility with rare conviction. The company demanded that the buildings be constructed so they could be easily expanded, torn down, or leased out - what SEI has called throwaway buildings. Illustrating the point, walls at the ends of buildings are closed off with unpainted plywood so they can be broken through. SEI wasn't using flexibility as a buzzword, Holcomb says. There was a downside to this, too.
Some employees quit rather than move because of the design of the new office.
The company, which was founded in 1968 to develop software for tracking the financial assets in estates, was expanding into software for administering mutual funds. The company also was pushing into investment advisory services for wealthy individuals and would eventually compete with the Vanguard Group, a corporate neighbor. Instead of smooth going, however, West says employees in different business lines were not talking to one another and, in fact, were competing with one another. West decided to shake things up. He reassigned the company's 92 secretaries to non-secretarial jobs, forcing executives, managers and other employees to do their own typing and faxing.