It was probably my youth and ignorance that saved me from the pressure,” says Dan Labbad. He is smiling as he thinks back to his formative business experience. Not yet 40, by the age of 27, Labbad’s career was already flying.
He had been with Lend Lease in Sydney for just two years and had already risen from planning engineer to running the project to upgrade Sydney Airport’s international terminal for the 2000 Olympics. It was Labbad’s job to deliver the transformation and keep the airport operational throughout.
He says: “At about three or four o’clock one Saturday morning the nightshift foreman rang me and said, ‘Dan, we can’t get the baggage handling system to start’. Saturday mornings are the busiest mornings at Sydney airport, and we had been upgrading the baggage handling system, including the software. There was a glitch in the software and the hardware. That was the tipping point and the thing failed.
“We were something like eight or nine weeks out from the Olympics. I turned up, and it was just chaos. The unions wouldn’t let us move the bags – only union labour could move the bags. We held up 15 to 20 747 positions for seven hours, at a consequential loss rate of A$1,000 per minute, per aircraft. It wasn’t a good day.
“What made it worse was, I got home, and we were the lead story on the six o’clock news. The tone was, ‘Those idiots out at Sydney airport. Look at what’s happened. It’s chaos. We’re going to bugger up the Olympics’.”
A bad situation got worse. “I was a young man, caught up in the crisis, and I’d failed to ring anybody at Lend Lease to tell them what was going on. They saw it on the six o’clock news. So I got a call from the top.”
Labbad laughs about it now. “Thankfully, Lend Lease is really good in that way. They give young people a go, and then they support you.”
Moments of truth
It was the making of him. “I learned a lot about myself in that experience,” he says. “We had a short period of time to get it right. We pulled together, we got it right and we dealt with the crisis. I think it’s those moments of truth and how you handle them that determines what you’ll do in your life moving forward when the same things happen on a bigger scale.
“At the time, I was horrified by the experience. But I look back now, and I think, what a wonderful thing to have happened. I’d much rather that happened then, than experiencing that for the first time now, which would be on a completely different scale.”
If it was a defining experience, it has helped to define a hugely successful career.
Currently chief executive officer of Lend Lease EMEA, Labbad has held various roles around the group globally. He has tried – and been tested in – roles in construction, development and within the corporate team.
After his airport trauma and ultimate triumph, he moved on to other career-determining postings, initially working for a charitable foundation (see box) and then in 2004 he developed and implemented a sustainability transformation plan for the company. It was an experience that clearly gave him an appetite for the cause. Before moving to the UK in 2006, he was a board member of the Australian Green Building Council and he now chairs its UK equivalent.
And if his Sydney Olympic experience taught him a great deal about himself, it has also served him well in his current position where delivering the London 2012 Athletes’ Village is among the most high profile of his priorities.
“One of the reasons we were selected is we had experience delivering infrastructure to fixed milestones,” he says. “Going into the Games, there was a lot of insecurity here around whether the UK could actually deliver the infrastructure on time. We’re only a small part of that, in doing the Athletes’ Village, but a fundamental part. And I think the government was looking for somebody with a track record that would actually work with them to ensure the deadline was met.”
Silence is celebration
If he has proved he can cope with pressure, he has also demonstrated he can adapt to his surroundings. Asked whether the demonstrable success of delivering the Games infrastructure has been sufficiently acknowledged by the press and the public, Labbad plays a straight bat. “I think silence is celebration here,” he says diplomatically.
He may have answered that question differently a few years ago, acknowledging that getting on in the UK has required him to change tack. “We speak the same language, but we do business very, very differently. I’ve enjoyed that learning process to the point where, when I go back to Australia, I’m called English by my contemporaries in Lend Lease and in the market. I think my style has changed.”
It is something that may have come naturally. Neither of his parents was born in Australia – his father is Egyptian and his mother Italian. “I grew up in an Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood, and my parents had a lot of multicultural friends. They didn’t just stay in either the Arab community or the Italian community. I grew up with a lot of diversity around me, and I think that that’s why I enjoy being in Europe so much.”
He may never have ended up working for Lend Lease at all. Labbad was rejected when he first applied. Instead, he pursued civil engineering with John Holland, travelled and dabbled in HR consulting and recruitment. Once Sydney had won the Olympics, he says modestly, there weren’t enough skilled people around, so he applied to Lend Lease again. This time he got in.
In 2006, he moved to the UK to work with the then new head of Lend Lease’s development business in Europe, Nigel Hugill. “Nigel was looking for somebody to help him write the strategy for the development business in the UK. So, I came over, and I met Nigel, and the idea was to stay with him for four weeks, and help him write the strategy, and then go back. Nigel and I got on so well he offered me a job to stay as operations manager.”
Complex projects
Now Labbad is running the show, but doing so in keeping with Lend Lease’s willfully contrary strategy. “The projects that we look for around the world are complex. We go for the hard ones, because the barriers to entry are high. And we think property is going to become more complex.”
Lend Lease’s regeneration project in London’s Elephant & Castle is a case in point. And despite setbacks to the project, which includes the £1.5bn transformation of one of the UK’s most rundown housing estates, he is optimistic. “The project is ahead of its de-risking process, relative to where we thought it would be a year ago, so it’s forging ahead, and that’s very encouraging. It’s the opportunity to create a couple of thousand residential units in central London. And given the housing crisis at the moment, it’s something that has to be done.”
Our interview comes just days after John Lewis pulled out of Tithebarn, Lend Lease’s retail scheme with Preston council.
“We knew that things were precarious because of what’s happening in the economy outside of London,” Labbad says. “We are watching a number of opportunities, not just that one, because I still believe in the regions, but we just need to be careful, because the recovery is going to be some way off.
“Patience is an issue. A couple of years ago, were we sitting here, we would have thought that things would be a lot better than they are today. And the reality is, they’re not.”
A career led by gut instinct
Dan Labbad’s career has not been textbook by any means. After delivering on the Sydney Airport project, in 2001 he took what many of his peers considered a backwards step, undertaking a secondment to establish the Hornery Institute, a non-profit organisation focusing on community development established by the employees and shareholders of Lend Lease.
“I’ve never been somebody that’s gone and said, ‘I want to be CEO of Lend Lease’. I’ve always just followed my heart. The best example of that is when I was finished at Sydney Airport. I was really looking for something different. There was a promotion in the midst for me, but there was something in my heart that just wasn’t right.”
That feeling lingered for a year until he heard the outgoing chairman Stuart Hornery talk about starting up a non-profit organisation to look at community development. “It was probably the equivalent of taking section 106 contributions, and leveraging them in order to meet community needs. It struck a chord.” After a couple of hours of discussion, Hornery asked Labbad to run the project.
“Everyone at Lend Lease, at the time, thought I was nuts. They said, ‘What are you doing? You’ve just finished this massive project, and you’re going to go and run this non-profit. Are you out of your mind?’ But again, I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t done that.
“I often get asked: ‘You’re 39 years old, how the hell did you get to where you’ve got to?’. I say I’ve been lucky but, equally, I think it’s important that you diversify, you broaden. I see a lot of people who are more experienced, but they’re narrow, and that limits them because we don’t know where the world’s going in the next 10 years.”
