Best Places to Work: The New Philly Workplace

Lunch is over, and everyone is heading back inside to work. Or so I think. I pass a conference room where a group has gathered to play Nintendo Wii tennis. I watch them for a while through the glass.

I sooo want to work here.

At the Vanguard

Maybe there is hope for the American worker after all. The progressive ideals of Gyro Worldwide and the warm, attractive environment of Beyond.com give me some optimism about corporate culture. But these are two companies that have the luxury of allowing skill sets to be trumped by creativity and energy. What about a profession where being uptight is, traditionally, a job requirement? What about, say, mutual-fund investment?

Vanguard is one of the largest investment firms in the country, and it sits right here in its own office park in Malvern. There’s a guard at the gate, and he gives me a Marine Corps salute as I go past his checkpoint. It turns out the campus’s similarity to a naval base isn’t merely accidental; as I find out later, the buildings are all named after the ships of Lord Horatio Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. It seems founder and former CEO John Bogle was a naval history buff.

“He had a real respect for the underdog,” says PR rep Amy Chain, as she shows me the statue of Bogle on the campus lawn. Though he retired as Vanguard’s CEO in 1996, Bogle is still alive and well, which makes him one of very few people outside of a banana republic who can walk past a public statue of himself. That must be cool.

Chain gives me a detailed analysis of how Vanguard is different from other investment firms, and how Bogle was at the vanguard (ha! A pun) of driving down the cost of mutual-fund investment. She eventually becomes aware that her explanation is going over my head. Hey, I’m not a Wall Street Journal reporter, okay? She dumbs it down for me: Vanguard made buying funds simple and cheap.