Mark Willes: leading from the crossroads.

• Author: Haraldsen, Tom
• Position: On the Cover

For decades, Salt Lake City has been referred to as "The Crossroads of the West." Now, the city's largest corporate tenant has reached a crossroads of its own, and has changed its management style to deal with the nation's deepest recession since the 1930s.

Chief among those changes is new leadership. Mark H. Willes became president and chief executive officer of Deseret Management Corporation on March 2 this year. The appointment of the 67-year-old Salt Lake City native was the start of a sweeping change in the operating model of the for-profit arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For the first time in the corporation's 43-year history, it will now serve as an operating company, rather than a holding company, for seven of the LDS Church's businesses, including three media-based companies--Bonneville International Corporation, Deseret News Publishing and Deseret Book.

That's where both Willes' corporate experience and his history could make for some interesting changes at DMC. He has been credited for increasing profits for companies he's led, criticized for some cost-cutting measures he's taken and questioned about his reluctance to fully embrace social media. How those blend together in the DMC caldron of companies is yet to be determined.

Answering the Call

Willes was enjoying semi-retirement when, in mid-January, he received a phone call from the LDS Church's Executive Committee. Made up of the church's First Presidency, three members of its Quorum of the Twelve and its Presiding Bishopric, the executive committe asked him to take the reigns of DMC from retiring CEO Rodney H. Brady, who had run the corporation since 1996.

"They were so kind and gracious," he says, in remembering the day his phone rang. "They said, 'Well, were wondering if you'd consider ..."'

Willes says he'd made the decision long ago to "do whatever was asked of me" by his church leaders. They asked him to become chairman of the board of all seven companies, with each company's CEO reporting directly to him.

Six weeks after he took the job, each of the company's existing boards were dissolved and new, smaller boards of directors were created. Willes formed four task forces to study and "to focus on different aspects of our company, such as IT, human resources and finance," he says. "What we are trying to do is to get perhaps greater clarity around why we do what we do, should we do certain things and should we not do other certain things. You need to have that if you're going to make the right strategic decisions about the directions you want these companies to go."

Willes says he is just beginning to see if the possibility of consolidation at DMC will become a reality. "Does it make sense? It not only needs to save money, but it also needs to be more effective," explains Willes. "Are there things we're doing in multiple places that can be done in one place? [Consolidation is] clearly very much on the table. How much of it well actually...