Broken Business

STEP 7 – REFOCUS THE STRATEGY

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

—Peter Drucker

It is now fairly common to see tall, narrow skyscrapers with all-glass facades decorating big-city skylines, but it wasn't too long ago that such sleek buildings were just an architectural dream. After all, they were not easy to build. One of the originals was the John Hancock Tower in Boston, a 60-storey rhomboid-shaped tower designed by Henry N. Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners. It was completed in 1976 and won a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in the following year. To this day, it is still the tallest building in New England. Its shiny reflective surface makes the building appear almost transparent on bright and sunny days, especially when viewed against a deep blue sky.

Making Cobb's bold design a reality proved to be extremely challenging. In fact, the opening of the building was delayed by five years. Meanwhile, the total cost is believed to have more than doubled while several engineering flaws were being fixed. The most famous of these was the tower's faulty windows, which kept falling out and tumbling hundreds of feet to St James Avenue below. For a time, so many of the window panes had been replaced with plywood that Bostonians nicknamed the building the ‘Plywood Palace’.

The problem proved to be the design of the windows themselves, which were among the first double-layered windows with reflective glass ever produced. ...