He got more than that. It happened in the usual way -- with a sudden, apparently random wave of Crow's magic wand. They were riding in an elevator together, the great landlord and the 30-year-old lawyer who had been handling his eviction cases, and the landlord said: "Oh, by the way, Don, can you go to Hong Kong with me next week?" That was in 1970. Three years later he was a partner. Two years after that, working with another TCC partner, Joel C. Peterson, Williams was striving furiously to bring some order and rationality to the debt-ridden network of partnerships.
"Coherence" is the word Williams uses to describe the first wave of changes. And between the upturn in the real-estate market of 1976 and the downturn of 1986, the company's assets grew from $1 billion to $14 billion, and the number of partners from 40 to 220.
This growth spurt has had far more thoroughgoing consequences for the company than the earlier recession. Financial controls and reporting requirements have gotten more stringent. The standard partnership agreement that in Tom Shutt's day was verbal, signed with a handshake, has slowly evolved into a 25-page document bristling with stipulations, contingencies, guarantees, and escape clauses, all the usual signs of mutual mistrust. Most important, the structure of the partnerships has been radically redesigned. What once looked like a sketch of an airline's flight paths has come to resemble that familiar image of corporate America, the pyramid.
If Crow the master builder is the client who commanded this structure to be built, and he most emphatically is, then his architect, equally emphatically, is Williams. He also sits on top of it, alone, no longer sharing the responsibilities of succession with Peterson. But in a basic sense the new restructuring represents the will of Crow himself, more so even than the first, primarily financial, one. The proof of this is in the organizational chart of TCC today. It shows a broad band at the top -- the Trammell Crow Co. -- and underneath it four separate divisions: Trammell Crow Commercial, Trammell Crow Residential, Trammell Crow Interests, and Trammell Crow Ventures, the overall money-management arm of the organization. What's new and significant are the Interests. In the first restructuring, Crow used Williams to institutionalize his partnerships. In the second, he deployed Williams to integrate all the other operations he had built up over the years: the hotel chains, the medical facilities, even rice farms in Louisiana -- $1 billion worth of personal holdings.
Williams himself -- the sort of man he is, the quality of his leadership -- is probably the best measure of Crow's willingness to change with the times. The man the founding father has chosen to be his favorite son, his successor, would appear to be as unlike his progenitor as a child can get and still belong to the same family. If Crow is an optimist tempered by realism, Williams is a realist tempered by skepticism. Crow talks about adding whole countries to the economy; Williams talks about a real break in the trend of the times. "Since World War II, really since the Depression, the economy has been in inflation and growth," he argues. "We rode that wave, driven by opportunity. Now, the wave is going out and we're riding it, too, but driven by efficiency.'
Williams is all intelligence, all kinds of intelligence. He can drop an apposite line from Nietzsche as easily, and as chillingly, as he can cite the latest statistics from the real-estate market in Houston. If will and energy are the distinguishing characteristics of Trammell Crow, along with charm, then will and discipline are the distinguishing characteristics of his designated successor, whose charm is purely intellectual. Williams himself doesn't shy away from the comparisons. "The day of the Lone Ranger, Trammell Crow riding into town and making deals, that's gone!" he said to a visitor recently. "The day calls for teams of highly professional people, disciplined entrepreneurs. If I'm wrong, we'll make a killing. But if I'm right, well, I think it's a tougher challenge. It takes a better entrepreneur to succeed in deflationary times. After all, that's what deflationary times are: times when failures outnumber successes. These days, high divers hit the pavement."
The consequences of Don Williams's discipline have been a transformation of the Trammell Crow Co. The partnership that Crow built is now the sort of place that he, as a younger man, could scarcely have tolerated. It has become a chic place to work, especially among the proud possessors of designer-label M.B.A.s, such as Harvard's. In 1984, it made the grade in The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, placing in the "10 best paying" and "10 best for benefits" categories, and among the 7 companies "where an advanced degree from a top school helps."
The partners who have come up in the past 10 years or so all tend to look as though they'd been ordered from a firm of social engineers, not discovered in an elevator. They certainly don't look as if they'd gotten where they are by having had a magic wand waved over them by a benevolent, wildly ambitious fairy godfather. They are as fresh and cool as Boston lettuce, as well-organized as a spreadsheet in a computer program, and as friendly and affable, if you met them socially, as the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys. The change in the social atmosphere reflects the "discipline" and "structure" that Crow, through Williams, wants to bring to TCC as the company endeavors to remain "evergreen" in this latest ice age.
