At SEI Investments Co., the desks are on wheels and the firm's founder sits in an open room with other employees.
Alfred P. West Jr., 63, the chief executive, said he set up the office that way when SEI moved its headquarters to Oaks in 1997 as a signal: "There is nothing that was going to stay stable. Get ready for change."
Change has been key to West's success. SEI, which West cofounded 40 years ago at the Science Center in West Philadelphia, moved quickly beyond its beginnings as a seller of computerized case studies for training bank loan officers.
Today, SEI has branched into the automation of banks' trust departments, the management of mutual funds, and the processing of transactions for money managers and investment advisers. The latest push at SEI is to get into those businesses all over the world - an effort that takes West to places such as Bahrain, Dubai, India and China.
Owners of SEI's shares - especially West, who still owns 19 percent of the company, according to the latest proxy - have been amply rewarded. The stock has returned 697 percent during the last decade, compared with 61 percent for the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index.
Among well-established companies in the Philadelphia region, only Penn National Gaming Inc. and Urban Outfitters Inc. have outperformed SEI on the stock market during that period.
SEI does not have a wide following among equity analysts, perhaps because it hasn't made an acquisition in more than five years.
But analysts who do follow the company said West's unique work environment was good for its particular business, which must adapt quickly to stiff competition.
"I think that the work environment compared to some of the more staid investment firms cultivates creativity, which this company needs to be on the leading edge," said Seth Dadds, an analyst with GARP Research & Securities Co. in Baltimore.
Rachel Mandeville, a Lehigh University graduate who started working at SEI in June 2006, said that when she interviewed with the company she fell in love with the place, the people and the open atmosphere.
The one problem she had with SEI was its location in the suburbs, far from public transportation. Having grown up in a Florida suburb between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, "where you have to drive to go anywhere," she had dreamed of living in a city and giving up her car.
Mandeville, who is in SEI's management-training program and works as an internal auditor, gave up her dream of carlessness to work at SEI. But after a few months on the job, she started poking around about getting a regional rail shuttle started.
She took the idea to the "green team," an informal group of employees that deals with environmental issues. Just a couple of months later, in January 2007, a shuttle to the Norristown train station started.
That experience backed up what Mandeville had heard during interviews at SEI. "This is really the only company I interviewed with that said: When you come here, your ideas are heard whether you're here for a month or for years," she said.
Because SEI has a variety of product lines, it doesn't have direct, overall competitors. Rather, it competes against SunGard Data Systems Inc., of Wayne, in software for bank trust departments; PNC's PFPC Inc., Wilmington, in mutual-fund processing; and Fidelity Investments in account-management software for investment advisors.
Its mutual funds, which are sold mostly through banks that do not have their own funds, compete against the entire mutual-fund industry.
During the last five years, SEI's assets under management increased from $72 billion to $202 billion, and the amount of money it administers for other managers rose from $233 billion to $423 billion.
Terrence Babe, a stock analyst at Think Equity Partners L.L.C. in San Francisco, said SEI's new software for global wealth managers gave the company a competitive advantage.
The first customer for the software, which provides the tools for all aspects of the money-management process, was HSBC, a London bank with offices in 83 countries. In August, HSBC's private bank was using the SEI system in 12 countries, in 19 currencies and on 12 stock exchanges.
West said similar moves were ahead for other parts of SEI. "Each one of our businesses is in some stage of going global," he said.