November 11, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

November 11, 2019/ Ken Ashley

Each week, I select a few articles that rise above the fray and hopefully help you on your journey in the CRE world. They pull from one of four "corners:" corporate real estate, technology, management science and anything positive. I welcome your comments on these articles.

1. If You Can Manage a Waffle House, You Can Manage Anything

To be clear, nobody (including my friend Bill) is arguing that all 1,950 Waffle Houses are shipshape operations. The company’s unscientific 3.3 employee rating on Glassdoor beats rivals like Denny’s and IHOP but trails McDonald’s. Worker reviews often contain gripes about long hours, chronic absenteeism, grueling holiday shifts, endless $8 checks and drunk and belligerent customers. “You will find grits in everything you wear,” says one. “Sometimes bacon grease makes the floors slippery,” says another.

There are also darker allegations involving employee theft, drug abuse, racism and sexual harassment. “Don’t be surprised if you find out your cook didn’t show up because he was in jail,” one reviewer said.

A Waffle House spokesman says the company has robust systems to support employees and enforce policies. But with more than 40,000 associates and millions of customers, “no system is perfect.”

It’s difficult to imagine how Waffle House attracts good managers—let alone operates a viable business. But the fascinating thing is that somehow, it does. The company declined to disclose its financials, but most estimates of its annual revenue exceed $1 billion. Waffle House says the share price of its employee-owned stock, which is based on its audited book value, has increased every year for the last 57. The company says it typically opens about 50 new restaurants a year.

2. How is Flexspace Changing US Corporate Culture For Property Decision-Makers

With the corporate US real-estate industry in flux and the concept of flexible working increasing demand for flexible office space (flexspace) across the nation, one of its biggest providers – International Workplace Group (IWG) – took part in three high-profile events throughout the country this October. IWG’s multi-brand approach is deliberately broad to account for all manner of business needs, including established brand Regus and design-driven new offering SPACES.

In Miami, the sixth annual Real Deal Real Estate Showcase + Forum was held on 17 October at Mana Wynwood. With over 3,500 attendees, 20 panellists and 70 industries represented, this one-day conference took a holistic view of corporate US real estate by covering it from every angle. With investors, buyers, brokers, financiers and developers all converging for a full day of networking and deal-making, this year’s event is where tomorrow’s trends were not only talked about but also set in motion.

Past topics have focused on themes including “Looking at the shifting strategies of commercial brokers and brokerages amid a slower market” – and it’s ideas like this that will certainly bear relevance as we shift to a more flexible job market and a more flexible approach to the manner and place of work. With over 6,000 delegates in attendance to experience the new projects, products and services in corporate real-estate on show, this was a not-to-be-missed affair for anyone in the South Florida area.

3. Molson Coors to Move Corporate Headquarters to Chicago

Chicago is set to become the corporate headquarters of Molson Coors Brewing Co. when the beer giant, facing “challenging industry dynamics,” relocates from Denver as part of a sweeping overhaul that includes expanding beyond ale products.

The maker of Coors Light and Blue Moon beers said it is “simplifying its structure” in a move to unlock $150 million in savings. As a result, the company is streamlining its corporate center and four business units into two concentrations: North America and Europe. It also plans to slash as many as 500 positions in the United States and Canada.

It’s all part of a larger plan to make the company more nimble as it branches into other products, both with alcohol and without, as consumer drinking habits shift and consumption of alcohol in general declines. For the third quarter, Molson Coors reported that revenues tumbled 3.2% and are forecast to fall to low-single digits in the next quarter.

4. Following Google and Facebook, Apple Commits $2.5B To Housing

Apple has one-upped the billion-dollar housing pledges made by fellow Silicon Valley tech giants Google and Facebook earlier this year.

Cupertino's trillion-dollar tech company has dedicated $2.5B to addressing California's housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. Apple is actively looking for developers for the project.

The commitment comes through several channels, but most will go toward affordable housing construction and financing for first-time homebuyers.

“Affordable housing means stability and dignity, opportunity and pride," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. "When these things fall out of reach for too many, we know the course we are on is unsustainable, and Apple is committed to being part of the solution.”

5. CRE Perspectives on CoWorking

Cushman & Wakefield partnered with CoreNet Global to survey global commercial real estate (CRE) executives. The report reveals corporate perceptions of the value of flexible workspace and coworking strategies.

Some key findings include:

Nearly two-thirds of companies utilize coworking to some degree, and many respondents expect to double their commitment to coworking over the next five years.
One-third of companies using flexible space report occupancy cost savings of more than 5 percent.
Despite an overall positive view of coworking, CRE executives are realistic about the challenges for the workforce.

Additional findings include general perceptions of coworking, current usage, expected impacts on cost, and past and future employee utilization of flexible office spaces.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

November 04, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

November 04, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Why Open Offices Aren’t Working — and How to Fix Them

In the mid ‘90s, the Italian designer Gaetano Pesce made a bold attempt to rethink the office. He created one in New York City that was more akin to a lounge or a coffee shop than the cubicle farm that was the norm for the day. Workers signed out a laptop on arrival, and then sought out a nook in which to work. Pesce’s creation paved the way for a brave new world where walls, physical and mental, were broken down. And since that day, workers have been more, and since that day, workers have been more and more productive and innovative.

Yeah, not totally.

By now most of us know that the promise of the open office as some kind of paperless and idea-percolating Mecca hasn’t quite played out that way. For one, there’s the lack of privacy, the excess of distractions. Sometimes those just make it hard to get your work done at the office.

Today’s guest has been studying why open offices are practically more closed and disruptive than they were made out to be. And his research identifies new technologies that are pointing to better ways to make the most of the office. Ethan Bernstein is a professor at Harvard Business School, and he’s a coauthor of the HBR article, “The Truth About Open Offices”. Ethan, thanks for being here.

2. Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint and It's Arguably the Smartest Management Move He's Ever Made

Jeff Bezos recently banned PowerPoint from meetings at Amazon, insisting instead that meetings start with the attendees silently reading a hard-copy document containing the information needed to discuss the issue.

This is not surprising, considering there's significant scientific research that the use of PowerPoint reduces organizational intelligence. However, replacing PowerPoint with "briefing documents" (as Bezos has done) isn't just good science; it's also an incredibly smart financial move.

Did I mention that it saves time? Good, because as I've pointed out previously, the average executive spends around 50 percent of his or her time in meetings (one third of which are totally useless). This is a huge productivity drain, above and beyond PowerPoint's infamous ability to reduce organizational intelligence.

3. Five hundred goats save the Ronald Reagan library from wildfires

Diligent work by a team of 500 goats has helped save the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library from wildfires that are ravaging parts of California.

The library deployed the goat squadron during the spring in order to munch their way through around 13 acres of scrubland around the library that could’ve provided tinder-like fuel to a wildfire.

This preventive action created a fire break between the library and the Easy fire, which has menaced thousands of homes in the Simi Valley near Los Angeles. More than 1,000 firefighters are tackling the blaze, which caused flames to approach the presidential library from a nearby hillside. Treasures saved include a piece of the Berlin Wall and Air Force One.

4. ’Tis the Season for Surge Robots as Holiday Hiring Finds Automation

The holiday hiring frenzy is under way and robots are joining the rush to seasonal jobs.

Retailers and logistics operators facing a tight labor market are ramping up automation at warehouses for the holidays, when online order volumes can surge tenfold as consumers load up digital shopping carts in the weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

To cope, some businesses are ordering up extra fleets of collaborative robots, or “cobots,” that use cameras, lasers and sensors to navigate warehouse aisles and lead workers to the right shelves or to shuttle bins full of products between workstations. Many are available for lease.

Rick Faulk, chief executive of Wilmington, Mass.-based Locus Robotics Corp., said demand for what he calls “surge robots” to bolster the armies of seasonal warehouse workers has grown this year, and the company is sending more than 500 of them to its logistics and e-commerce customers.

5. CEO of biggest US mall owner says retail industry is ‘reaching the bottom’ of bankruptcies

The CEO of the biggest mall owner in the U.S., Simon Property Group, says the retail industry looks to be “reaching the bottom” of a tumultuous wave of bankruptcies.

“We are having a high bankruptcy year. ... There’s no denying that,” David Simon told analysts during a post-earnings conference call on Wednesday morning. “But I think we’re kind of reaching the bottom in ... 2019 on that stuff. It’s rivaling what happened in 2017. So, it’s not like something that we haven’t experienced before. But we know [what] we have to do.”

Simon shares were last down about 3.5% Wednesday afternoon, having fallen about 12% this year.

The CEO’s comments come on the heels of Forever 21 and Barneys New York, among other retail chains, filing for bankruptcy this year. So far in 2019, U.S. retailers have announced 8,993 store closures and 3,780 store openings, compared with 5,844 closures and 3,258 openings in all of 2018, according to a tracking by Coresight Research. The consulting firm expects closures could still hit a record 12,000 by the end of this year.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

October 28, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

October 28, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Could a Ski Hill, a Theme Park and 40 Water Slides Save the American Mall?

American Dream, the most expensive U.S. mall ever built, opened Friday. It is the first in the U.S. to devote more space to entertainment, restaurants and theme-park rides than to traditional retail. Given that more than a few people have declared the mall dead, the entire industry is glued to the spectacle to see if its formula could save the American shopping center from oversupply and the rise of online shopping.

The nearly 90-acre site, built over swampland next to the Meadowlands Sports Complex, is opening in phases stretching to 2021, at a cost so far of $5.7 billion. The total could reach $6 billion, after amenities such as a planned hotel and convention center are added.

Construction crews are working on more attractions, many targeted to families. Legoland Discovery Center and the Sea Life Aquarium will open in the spring. Children will be able to play around in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 at KidZania, due to open in 2021. Minigolf enthusiasts can tackle Pig Island and other challenges at the Angry Birds-themed 18-hole indoor golf course.

2. How to Weigh the Risks When Choosing Your First Job

Overwhelmed by student debt and underwhelmed by your career choices? It’s normal to feel anxious. The economy is undergoing a radical transformation as technology changes the nature of work and some jobs disappear. To make matters more complicated, most industries are dominated by a handful of superstar, productive firms that shower their employees with most of the economy’s wage gains. If you work at these firms, you get more raises, learn useful skills, and get a stamp of approval that offers credibility throughout your career. If you don’t, your career and wages could stagnate.

Picking the right path has never felt more crucial to lifelong success. But fear not — you can make the right choice by applying some basic risk management tools to your most valuable asset: your future earnings.

The simplest and most effective risk management tool is setting clear goals. It can also be the hardest part because most people don’t know what they want. I still marvel at people I knew in college who at 22 knew they wanted to be an equity research analyst, have three children, and live in the suburbs. Many of them got all of these things. I don’t know if they are happy or not. But no doubt, possessing such clear goals increased the odds of getting what they wanted.

3. How Much Inheritance Is Too Much?

When Lynn Chen-Zhang’s older son was in third grade, he came home from school one day wondering why he bothered studying so hard: A classmate had told him that because he had wealthy parents, he’d be all taken care of in life. What was the use?

This question worried Chen-Zhang and her husband—who run a financial-advisory firm in Portage, Michigan—and prompted them to have a talk with their two boys about their financial future. They planned to pay for as much schooling as their kids wanted, but beyond that, Chen-Zhang told me, their message was, “You're on your own. And don’t expect any inheritance from us.”

Chen-Zhang’s sons ultimately studied plenty hard—now in their early 20s, they are both establishing careers in finance—so if she and her husband were to give them any help with money, she guesses it’d come in the form of a gift to any future grandkids, such as a contribution to a college-savings plan. “I think it is not in the next generation’s best interest to leave them a large sum of money,” she said. “From a selfish standpoint, I want my kids to be successful. I want them to be contributing members [of] society.”

Chen-Zhang and her husband’s approach may be a reversal of the typical way of thinking about inheritances, but it is one that is also preoccupied with heirs’ well-being. Some affluent parents are focused not on whether their kids will have enough, but on ensuring that they won’t have too much.

4. Institutions Continue to Raise Real Estate Allocations in 2019

CRE investment_Getty Images-1058320542-1540.jpg

An annual report from Hodes Weill and Cornell University shows real estate remains a preferred asset class among global institutions. Global institutions continue to raise their allocations to real estate, according to the latest Allocations Monitor survey from Hodes Weill & Associates and the Columbia University Baker Program in Real Estate.

The survey, based on responses of 212 institutional investors, found that institutions increased their weighted target allocations to real estate to 10.5 percent in 2019—a 10-basis-point increase compared to last year, which translates into a dollar volume of roughly $80 billion to $120 billion of additional capital coming into the space.

The 10-basis-point increase is slightly smaller than in prior years. Between 2017 and 2018, target allocations increased by 30 basis points and between 2016 and 2017, they increased by 20 basis points. Looking forward, respondents said they expect allocations in 2020 to the sector is expected in 2020 to grow 20 basis points.

5. Moving a Major Corporate Headquarters? A Look at One Shift in Progress

Paint giant Sherwin-Williams, now based in Cleveland, is rumored to be on the hunt for a new headquarters location. Cities reportedly at the top of the company's list are Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte, North Carolina, three cities that have become magnets for other corporate expansions and relocations.

While the rumors continue to swirl over Sherwin-Williams' next move, CoStar analysts have taken a look at those three contenders and examined which buildings there would be best suited to land Sherwin-Williams or another major corporate tenant.

If Sherwin-Williams or any other major corporation chooses to relocate or expand, Atlanta is an obvious choice for a new home. The region is already home to a multitude of Fortune 1000 companies, renowned universities that produce top talent and, of course, the world’s busiest airport.

Any large company can pick from several options for a new headquarters. Tower Square, previously occupied by AT&T, provides major tenants with 1.4 million square feet of space that is ready for move in. Icahn Enterprises is underway on a renovation of the ground-floor retail and plaza space that should be completed in the next few quarters. The tower stands on top of a subway station and is positioned in Atlanta’s hottest neighborhood: midtown.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

October 21, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

October 21, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Think Flexibility: Adapting To The New Workforce Norm

How and where employees work continues to evolve, supported by integrated technology. @9 Amenity Center, Fifty South Sixth in Minneapolis by DLR Group. Photo by Brandon Stengel.

here was a time when full-time office work meant logging a 40-hour workweek between 8-5 in an office environment where everyone was assigned a personal workspace, which was often designated based on hierarchy; 5:00 p.m. and after was reserved for “personal time.”

Our work norm today looks much different. Modern office life is a broad composite of cultures and work styles, with people working in the office, out of the office, and around the clock. This ongoing shift in the makeup of our workforce has had dramatic implications for both employees and employers.

As we look to the future, business success will require a work environment and corporate atmosphere in support of today’s multi-faceted workforce. Understanding the characteristics of our evolving workforce and the elements stimulating this transformation will shed light on how the corporate workplace can be designed to support a blended talent pool.

2. How to Get Community Buy-In for a Retail-to-Industrial Conversion

Retail-to-industrial conversion projects are rare: A data point by Cushman & Wakefield shows that they make up less than one-tenth of one percent (0.073%) of the total industrial inventory.

One reason many of these projects fail to gain traction is they cannot overcome the hurdle of gaining buy-in from the local community. “A community will likely want to keep the retail presence. It will have a hard time believing that the retail presence cannot come back or recover,” Tray Anderson, C&W’s logistics and industrial lead for the Americas, tells GlobeSt.com.

That said, there are such projects underway across the US and while their journey to groundbreaking was different in each case we can assume that some fundamental concepts about marketing and communication were held in common.

3. Here’s How To Empower Your Employees—And Make Them Love You

Having a good boss is crucial to your success and happiness at work — in fact, the majority of professionals say that it’s essential that they like the person they’d be reporting to when accepting a new job, and two-thirds would even turn down a job offer if they didn’t believe they could respect their new boss.

LinkedIn Learning surveyed over 2,000 professionals to find out the qualities employees want most in a manager. Overwhelmingly, people want a manager to help problem solve the challenges they face. Problem solving (68%) was followed by a manager who can manage time effectively (44%), who’s decisive (41%), and who has empathy (38%) and compassion (36%).

Managers are definitely in a position to empower their employees in coming up with creative solutions to unexpected problems. When they receive helpful and enthusiastic support from their boss, employees not only tend to feel more engaged at work, but they also apply those skills to helping advance the team.

4. 12 Tech Experts Reflect On The Most Important Technology Developments Of 2019

In recent decades, our world has moved away from the analog and firmly into the digital realm. Technology is now incorporated into nearly every facet of our lives, both professional and personal.

Modern technology will only continue to evolve in the years ahead, and consumers often look to industry insiders to identify the next technological game-changer.

For a deeper dive, we asked the experts of Forbes Technology Council to weigh in on the most important tech developments of 2019. Here are the technologies they believe have been the most impactful this year and why.

5. How Real Estate Is Being Used As A Weapon In The Streaming Wars

This year, the so-called streaming wars have ramped up, and the battle is only set to intensify over the next six months. In a few weeks, The Walt Disney Co. will launch its highly anticipated streaming subscription service, Disney+, while NBC’s Peacock and AT&T’s HBO Max are both set to launch in the spring. Apple TV+ — with $6B reportedly available for original content — is available in November.

It is a new era for viewers and content creators, but the impact on commercial real estate could be almost as profound. Increasingly, these companies want to build and control their own production space and creative hubs for their talent.

With more shows vying for the viewers, the pressure is on for the shows to stand out from the pack, meaning bigger budgets and stretched-out production schedules — all resulting in longer-term lease deals, making the real estate they occupy more valuable.

Increasingly, commercial real estate players said, owners of studio space can bank on more demand with greater regularity, and for a longer time. And as streaming giants like Netflix forge ahead with major real estate expansions, big leases and their own production facilities, it could set a new bar for the industry.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

October 14, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

October 14, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Early Beginnings: How The Forbes 400 Richest Americans Got Their Entrepreneurial Start

Are entrepreneurial children more likely to become entrepreneurs as adults? And therefore more likely to gain a coveted spot on The Forbes 400? For the first time, we asked all 400 of the richest Americans about their first jobs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were plenty of anecdotes of these list members showing early entrepreneurial promise even as youngsters, from making beeswax candles to playing the accordion during movie admissions.

Whether they had their beginnings in plucky childhood jobs or in pioneering small businesses, many of the fortunes on The Forbes 400 originated with the drive of young entrepreneurs looking to make their mark.

2. Why Everything Is Getting Louder

Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.

As environmental hazards go, noise gets low billing. There is no Michael Pollan of sound; limiting your noise intake has none of the cachet of going paleo or doing a cleanse. When The New Yorker recently proposed noise pollution as the next public-health crisis, the internet scoffed. “Pollution pollution is the next big (and current) public health crisis,” chided one commenter.

Noise is treated less as a health risk than an aesthetic nuisance—a cause for people who, in between rounds of golf and art openings, fuss over the leaf blowers outside their vacation homes. Complaining about noise elicits eye rolls. Nothing will get you labeled a crank faster.

3. Freddie, Fannie Offer More Competitive Loan Terms After Re-Set Lending Caps

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lenders are once again fighting hard to make deals.

“Agency lenders are now beating banks and life companies—when they want the loans, they are beating them,” says Richard Katzenstein, senior vice president and national director with Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp. in the firm’s New York City office.

That’s a big change from just a month ago, when the mortgage giants were hiking up interest rate spreads in a frantic attempt to stay under the limits set for them by federal regulators. The interest rates offered by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lenders were once again competitive by the first week of October 2019.

4. Accommodating Atlanta’s Future Growth: Rethinking Land Use to Make Better Transportation Decisions

By 2040, metro Atlanta is projected to grow by 2.5 million people, bringing it to 8 million people, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. Understanding how transportation and land use can accommodate this increase was one of the subjects discussed at a recent ULI Atlanta event. The event was cohosted in partnership with Perimeter Connects and the Perimeter Community Improvement Districts.

Transit in Atlanta has a long road ahead. Speaking at the event, Georgia State Sen. Brandon Beach recounted his attempt to travel from one end of Atlanta to the other, a total of 38 miles, by using transit. The trip took him more than four hours and required visiting three websites to plan the trip across county lines.

Georgia House Bill 930, which was sponsored by Beach, was designed to expand mass transit in metro Atlanta and allow for more coordination across county lines, becoming law in 2018.

“If we do make it easy and we make it simple to get from point A to point B and if we can figure out that last mile, either through Uber or e-scooters or what to get you to your job, I do think people will look at mass transit and public transportation as an option,” Beach said.

5. US 2019 Holiday Season Preview

The 2018 holiday season was one of the best in recent years, with strong growth rates posted both online and at brick-and-mortar on the back of a robust consumer economy. But the conditions might not be as favorable as we look ahead to the 2019 holidays.

Total retail spending was up 5.4% to $998.32 billion, falling just shy of our earlier forecast of $1.002 trillion, with the shortfall coming from the unexpected drop in gas prices to end the year. Traditional retail was very strong, with brick-and-mortar sales rising 3.9% to $874.42 billion and ecommerce soaring 16.7% to $123.90 billion.

Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day in history, with a reported $7.87 billion. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving and Black Friday both continue to experience significantly above-average growth rates as they become more important shopping days for ecommerce.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

October 07, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

October 07, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Millennials Could Drive Resurgence in Suburbs … If They Choose to Exit Urban Areas

Cities may have commanded much of the attention of investors and developers over the past decade, but suburbs hardly fell out of favor.

In fact, people of all ages continued to move to the suburbs, giving them roughly double the urban population, according to CoStar analysts in a recent webinar entitled “Playing the ‘Lawn’ Game: Strategy in the Suburbs.”

The suburbs, in fact, may be just the place for investing in apartments, office and retail properties, if millennials, the largest living generation, decide to do what previous generations have done before them and move there in droves. Indeed, one large block of millennials, those born in the early 1990s and reaching their 30s, are now forming families and looking to put down roots.

Their first stop likely will be in rentals. “A bet on them gradually putting on the trappings of adulthood feels safe, and bet against them being able to own homes at the same rate as their elders is also reasonable,” Andrew Rybczynski, a CoStar senior consultant, said in the webinar.

2. Young People Are Going to Save Us All From Office Life

Illustration by Shannon Lin/The New York Times

When Ariel Coleman, 28, quit her last job, as a project manager in the corporate office of a bank, it wasn’t because her new employer offered her a raise, a different role or more seniority. “The work-life balance is just much better,” she said.

At her new company, Omfgco, a branding and design firm in Portland, Ore., everyone works from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays at whichever hours they choose. Ms. Coleman can go for a run or walk her dog.
At the bank, she said, people judged her for taking all her paid time off. At Omfgco, it’s encouraged, which is why she didn’t mind answering work emails while sitting by the fire on a recent camping trip.

“It’s: Get your work done, but don’t worry about when those hours are,” Ms. Coleman said. “A client calls me at 8 o’clock at night and I’m happy to talk to them, because that means the next day at 10 a.m., I can take my dog to the vet. It enables me to make my career more seamless with my life. It makes it feel more like people are human.”

3. U.S. Unemployment Hit 50-Year Low in September

U.S. unemployment dropped to a half-century low in September and job growth continued at a modest pace, signs the economy is holding up despite a broader global slowdown.

The jobless rate dropped to 3.5% in September from 3.7% in August, marking the lowest rate since December 1969 when it also logged in at 3.5%. Employers added 136,000 jobs in September, and payrolls for August and July were revised up, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Job gains and historically low unemployment have helped buffer the U.S. economy against weakness in manufacturing at home and abroad that have stoked concerns of a deepening slowdown.

A falling unemployment rate should allay fears of a recession, said Josh Wright, chief economist at iCIMS Inc., a maker of employee-recruiting software.

4. Reports On The Death Of Parking Needs Are Greatly Exaggerated

“Parking is a tricky issue because every landlord friend I talk to tells me we’re going to have driverless cars,” Cushman & Wakefield Executive Vice Chairman Tim Relyea said at Bisnow’s Future of Downtown Houston event Tuesday. “Every deal now has provisions about parking being reduced down the road. Yet every deal I’m doing Downtown, tenants want more parking. It’s long term, they’re committed and they need it. That’s one thing Downtown needs to keep a handle on. Downtown monthly parking rates reflect a $5-10 SF premium relative to rents for offices in the suburbs.”

Downtown and adjacent neighborhoods EaDo and Midtown have been exempted from Houston’s minimum parking requirements under an ordinance approved by city council. The move was celebrated by opponents of parking minimums who argue they eat up space in the urban core and no longer reflect the state of commuter habits. Why not let developers decide their own parking situation, they say.

But as parking minimums are stripped away, Houston’s parking needs are increasing.

5. UPS wins first broad FAA approval for drone delivery

United Parcel Service received federal approval to operate a fleet of drones, giving it broad privileges to expand unmanned package delivery, the shipping giant said Tuesday.

The company’s Flight Forward subsidiary plans to use the approval to deliver packages to hospital campuses, with potential to expand to other services later. It’s the first time the Federal Aviation Administration has granted such broad approval to a company to operate a fleet of drones as an airline.

The approval is a milestone in commercial drone delivery, with companies including Amazon, Uber and Google parent Alphabet, under its Wing Aviation unit, racing to add unmanned aircraft to their fleets to save on costs and deliver goods faster.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

September 30, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

September 30, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Industrial Investors Drive Cap Rates Lower in Secondary and Tertiary Markets

Demand for industrial space is still outstripping supply, despite a record-high construction pipeline that delivered 126.8 million sq. ft. of new space in the first half of the year. Another 327.5 million sq. ft. underway, according to Cushman & Wakefield's second quarter 2019 MarketBeat industrial report. Net absorption for the first half of the year totaled 88.6 million sq. ft., and new leasing activity in the first two quarters involved 256.6 million sq. ft.

With demand for logistics facilities still going strong, vacancy has remained at or below 5.0 percent, according to Jason Tolliver, managing director of investment services at Cushman & Wakefield.

But sales volume is expected to soften in 2019 compared to record-setting activity last year, in part due to “retailers trying to get ahead of tariffs (on Chinese goods),” Tolliver notes.

2. Tip Your Hotel Maid

As I check out of a hotel, various excuses race through my head for not tipping the housekeeper. I’m in a big rush. I don’t have cash. Will the maid who folded my clothes get the money? Why can’t I just add a gratuity to the credit-card bill and expense it?

About 70 percent of hotel guests go through the same mental exercise and end up not leaving a tip. A waiter would have to spit in your soup, and you would have to see him do it, to stiff him. Housekeepers are stiffed every day. I’ve heard every reason why guests treat hotel workers so differently than other service workers, but I’ve not heard a good one.

I have more than a passing interest in the subject. For 10 years, my grandmother, Nellie O’Connor McCreary, was a maid at the Hotel Washington, now the W Hotel. If you lean over the railing of its rooftop bar after a drink or two, you’d swear you could see the Oval Office.

3. ULI, PwC Emerging Trends Report Forecasts Continued Strength in CRE in 2020

The commercial real estate market remains strong, despite talk of an approaching recession, according to an Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2020 report produced by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and consulting firm PwC and released at this week’s ULI fall meeting.

“Real estate is in a very good space,” said Mitch Roschelle, partner and business development leader with PwC, at the event. “The real estate community caused two recessions: it caused it in housing, and it caused it in the savings and loan crisis. This go-around, whatever happens, it ain’t going to be [real estate’s] fault.”

U.S. commercial real estate remains a favored asset class due to volatility in the global financial markets and global geopolitical instability, driving investors toward safety of U.S. properties.

4. The Math Behind A Last Touch Warehouse Location

Selecting the right location for Last Touch facilities is, to state the obvious, key to their success. Delivery times from Last Touch facilities can be measured in hours, Prologis said. As a result, location characteristics for this segment are the most similar to retail.

Building-level characteristics are often secondary to location considerations. “Furthermore, the largest, densest markets often have the greatest challenges to on-time delivery (such as high congestion), which increases the importance of well-located facilities,” according to the paper.

Not all markets warrant a Last Touch location however. Prologis determined that the top 25 US markets, with aggregate income of more than $100 billion, qualify for at least a City presence and the top eight markets, with aggregate income of more than $250 billion, are likely targets for a Last Touch operation. “Around the world, major 24-hour cities generate the need for Last Touch operations; those cities include Tokyo, London, Shanghai, Paris and Mexico City,” it said.

5. Is Retail-To-Industrial The Next Big Thing, Or Just A Pipe Dream For Last-Mile Logistics?

The contraction of retail, and the empty spaces it has left behind, has meant opportunity for industrial redevelopment in some cases, such as a former regional mall in Ohio that is now serving Amazon.

That prominent example is the site of the 2.2M SF Randell Park Mall in suburban Cleveland. Vintage 1976, the property sputtered to an end in the 21st century. The site was razed entirely a few years ago and is now an Amazon warehouse, or fulfillment center, as the retail giant calls it.

The location near the intersection of I-480 and I-271 that made the mall a viable retail property in its heyday now adds to its attractiveness as an industrial site — particularly for Amazon, according to Industrial Commercial Properties, which developed the new facility.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

September 23, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

September 23, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. The U.S. Commercial Real Estate Market Remains Strong Despite Global Economic Concerns

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Ten years since the economic expansion started after the Great Recession, commercial real estate remains strong. Many real estate professionals and investors expected markets, including real estate, to contract sooner, entering hyper-supply.

At the 2015 CCIM Institute’s annual conference Sam Zell, the founder and chairman of Equity International, discussed the sale of his multifamily portfolio with more than 23,000 apartments to Starwood Capital Group for $5.4 billion. He believed that it was an opportune time to sell his portfolio; and, many real estate professionals believed that he had sold at the top of the market, based strongly on his foresight in 2007 to sell his office portfolio before the market crashed.

Obviously, taking profits off the table is a win, but were there more profits to realize? Since then, multifamily properties have continued their run, driving prices even higher and squeezing cap rates even more.

2. To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself

Most of us — even those at the top — struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When I ask my clients what makes them nervous, invariably they respond with the same answers:

“I don’t like being watched.”

“I don’t like the eyes on me.”

“I don’t like being in the spotlight.”

And it follows that when they get up to speak, nearly all of them initially avoid making eye contact with members of the audience. Therein lies the problem: While avoiding direct eye contact may seem like an effective strategy for coping with speaking anxiety, it actually makes you even more nervous.

To understand why, we need to go way back to prehistoric times, when humans perceived eyes watching us as an existential threat. Those eyes were likely predators. People were literally terrified of being eaten alive. In response to that prehistoric reality, the amygdala, the part of our brain that helps us respond to danger, kicked into full gear. And when our fight-or-flight response gets triggered, we understandably feel intense stress and anxiety. What does this have to do with public speaking? Turns out, everything.

3. The Inconvenient Truth About E-Commerce: It's Largely Unprofitable

The disruptive nature of e-commerce is undeniable. Entirely new business models are revolutionizing the way we buy. The transformative transparency created by all things digital has revolutionized product access, redefined convenience and lowered prices across a wide spectrum of merchandise and service categories. The radical shift of spending from brick & mortar stores to online shopping is causing a massive upheaval in retailers' physical footprint, which looks to continue unabated.

But the inconvenient (and oft overlooked) truth is that much of e-commerce remains unprofitable--in many cases wildly so--and many corporate and venture capital investments have no prospect of earning a risk-adjusted ROI.

While it was once thought that the economics of selling online were vastly superior to operating physical stores, most brands--start-ups and established retailers alike--are learning that the cost of building a new brand, acquiring customers and fulfilling orders (particularly if product returns are high) make a huge percentage of e-commerce transactions fundamentally profit proof. Slowly but surely the bloom is coming off the rose.

4. Talk to People on the Telephone

In the past year, I’ve been on a mission to pester as many people in my life as possible. The first victim was my editor, whom I abruptly asked one morning to stop messaging me about story ideas on our office’s chat platform, Slack. Instead, I said, let’s talk the ideas out over the phone. I soon did the same thing to a friend who’d texted to discuss a job offer he’d just received. A few weeks later, when another friend texted me for New York City apartment-hunting tips, I asked her my new favorite question in return: Do you want to give me a call?

The phone call has lost its primacy in American communication. By 2014, texting had become more common for Americans under 50. The popularity of text-based communication tools such as WhatsApp and Instagram direct messaging has exploded since. People currently in their 20s and 30s, in particular, have developed a reputation for being allergic to phone calls. The phone call, like chain restaurants and golf, is among the cultural institutions that Millennials might murder.

True to this generational stereotype, I long sent my own mother to voicemail and texted her to ask what she wanted. Instead of calling my hair salon to make an appointment, I’d simply let my roots grow for an extra six or eight weeks, until the place bothered me enough to dial the number. No matter the task, I’d always text or email first. Was there an app for that?

5. Cushman & Wakefield Serves Four Organizations at Annual Great Day of Service

Yesterday, Cushman & Wakefield’s Atlanta office held its Annual Great Day of Service. Each fall, the office closes so employees can volunteer at a local organization. This year, our team of over 200 employees divided and conquered to a variety of projects throughout the city.

Culture is at the heart of Cushman & Wakefield – we believe people should love what they do and who they work for. Giving back to the communities in which our team members live and work is a cornerstone of that culture and guiding principles.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

September 16, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

September 16, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Founders of Cushman & Wakefield’s Atlanta Office Reunite for Panel

In order to know where a company is headed, it is important to understand where it came from. At Cushman & Wakefield Atlanta’s recent monthly All-Team meeting, we assembled a panel of the four founders of our office and former Managing Principal Mike Elting to share the history of the firm, the importance of culture and talk about some of their landmark deals.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Atlanta operations began when the firm acquired the successful local brokerage operation of Bugg, Coppedge, Ghertner & McWilliams (“BCGM”) on November 4, 1977. BCGM was comprised of top producers – Bill Bugg, John Coppedge, Andy Ghertner and Art McWilliams – formerly with Adair Realty Co., at that time Atlanta’s oldest commercial real estate firm.

“When we were first approached by Cushman & Wakefield, we asked to visit other offices and see what the people who worked here were like out in the field,” Coppedge said. “It was the smartest thing we did. When we visited, we saw that those employees were our people, and we knew when we came back that we wanted to make the deal.”

2. Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy

Eight years ago we launched a global study of high growth in companies, investigating the importance of three strategies known to drive it: creating new markets, serving broader stakeholder needs, and changing the rules of the game. What we found surprised us. Although each of those approaches did boost growth at the organizations we studied, there was a fourth driver we hadn’t considered at all: purpose.

Companies have long been encouraged to build purpose into what they do. But usually it’s talked about as an add-on—a way to create shared value, improve employee morale and commitment, give back to the community, and help the environment.

But as we worked with the high-growth companies in our study and beyond, we began to recognize that many of them had moved purpose from the periphery of their strategy to its core—where, with committed leadership and financial investment, they had used it to generate sustained profitable growth, stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, and deepen ties with their stakeholders.

3. Burglars Are Following You on Facebook

When my daughter’s wedding drew the family out of town for an extended weekend, I should have realized that my home’s security was as fragile as the family’s emotions.

The mail and the six newspapers I receive each day were dutifully picked up by a neighbor. A few lights were strategically left on in the house. The alarm system was engaged. Yet as I was getting set to walk Stephanie down the aisle, my cellphone vibrated with news from the alarm company that our house was experiencing an active burglary. The culprit, I’m convinced, was social media.

Our newly married daughter has absorbed a few words of my wisdom over the years, but I’ve never been able to modify her behavior when it comes to PDA: public displays of addresses. Her life is an open Facebook.

4. Future Warehouses Will Have to Accommodate Robots Too

The average rentable building area for newly delivered warehouse product has increased by 60% nationally over the past 20 years, according to a recent report from Cushman & Wakefield. Partly this size increase is due to the larger inventories warehouses must accommodate for e-commerce flows. But another tech driver is in the mix as well: robots.

C&W believes that clearer differentiations in asset quality are likely to emerge as some technologies—such as robotics—require higher ceilings (32 to 36 feet clear) and very flat floors. In short, this means that the warehouse of the future will not just be built for people but also for robots, C&W concluded.

“Redesign of warehouses will likely include repurposing employee parking and break rooms which could be converted to logistics space, increasing the built inventory,” it said. Widespread adoption of these technologies is expected to occur within the next 5-20 years, it estimates but also acknowledges that resistance from labor groups will likely slow automation.

5. Your Expense Report Is a Window Into Your Soul

What does your expense report say about you?

Filing business-expense reports is a slam dunk for road warriors who submit them often, or have assistants to do it for them. But for the rest of us—the majority of filers who submit expense claims only a few times a year—the task can be one of the worst parts of a job.

How people handle expense reports reveals a lot about their attitudes toward their employer, and their emotional baggage about money. Based on corporate research and insights from psychologists, here are a few common expense-reporting profile.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

September 09, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

September 09, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Atlanta's Stalwarts, Newcomers All Flocking To Its Priciest Buildings

The activity still boils down to the key that has driven office tenants this past cycle: recruitment. Amid signs the economy could be heading for a slowdown or possibly a recession, companies' C-suites are aware how their office space directly affects their ability to recruit new talent, Cushman & Wakefield Executive Director Ken Ashley said.

“It's budget season. We'll see how the budgets impact the moves for next year,” Ashley said. "But the reality is the talent war is hotter than ever."

A number of banner deals have already been inked since the start of the year, giving Atlanta a healthy absorption rate of nearly 1M SF through the second quarter, according to Colliers.

2. What to Expect From Apple’s Fall Hardware Extravaganza

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When Apple’s annual fall hardware event takes place next week, it will come amid an important shift for the company. Sales of the iPhone, the device that has made the company hundreds of billions of dollars over the past decade, have slowed. Jony Ive, the legendary designer responsible for the look and feel of all things Apple, has left. The company has been pushing subscription services like never before, in the form of streaming music, digital news, and star-studded original video series. Somewhat bizarrely, it just started offering a credit card.

To be clear, Apple is still one of the most valuable tech companies in the world, with a stockpile of over $200 billion in cash. It’s doing just fine, and it will continue to try to lock people into its ecosystem with the iPhone as the linchpin.

But the challenges for Apple at this particular moment are complex. At a macro level, Apple faces the regular threat of disruption to its famously efficient supply chain strategy because of President Donald Trump’s trade feud with China.

The security of iOS is falling under greater scrutiny. And Apple’s positions as both a giant store for apps and as a powerful app maker itself are being questioned. Tech, over the past few years, has finally met its skeptics.

3. Why You Need a Password Manager. Yes, You.

You probably know that it’s not a good idea to use “password” as a password, or your pet’s name, or your birthday.

But the worst thing you can do with your passwords — and something that more than 50 percent of people are doing, according to a recent Virginia Tech study — is to reuse the same ones across multiple sites. If even one of those accounts is compromised in a data breach, it doesn’t matter how strong your password is — hackers can easily use it to get into your other accounts.

But even though I should know better, up until a few months ago I was still reusing the same dozen or so passwords across all of my everything (though at least I had turned on two-factor authentication where I could). It’s just too difficult to come up with (and remember) unique, strong passwords for dozens of sites. That’s why, after much cajoling from co-workers, I started using a password manager — and it’s why you should be using one, too. Aside from using two-factor authentication and keeping your operating system and Web browser up-to-date, it’s the most important thing you can do to protect yourself online.

4. A Beginner's Guide To Executing A Social Media Marketing Funnel

You’ve probably heard the term "marketing funnel" being thrown around (or perhaps this is your first time hearing it). Either way, you might not have any idea what it means. If you don’t know how it works, it’s possible that your business could be losing out on major revenue.

Before we jump into how to build a social media marketing funnel, let’s start with what a marketing funnel actually is and why it’s important to your business.

What is a marketing funnel?

In simple words, a marketing funnel is a strategy which creates the necessary steps a customer goes through before getting them to that crucial conversion stage (aka doing what we want them to do).

5. Rent Concessions Near 20-Year Lows But Evident in Some Markets

Nationwide, the percentage of units offering rental concessions is at some of its lowest levels in nearly two decades. Still, some markets–mostly the country’s big construction centers–are offering concessions at notably higher rates, according to a study by RealPage.

After peaking at 65.8% in fourth quarter 2009, the percentage of stabilized apartments in the US offering concessions has been on a steady downward trajectory. As of second quarter 2019, concessions were available in only 14.1% of apartments, one of the lowest rates the market has recorded since mid-2002. Concession rates fell below the 20% mark in second quarter 2017 and have remained beneath that threshold since that time, says the study.

Some markets, however, are still commonly awarding concessions in a sizable portion of stock. These big concession markets have been some of the nation’s most prolific supply centers during the current economic cycle. Also, while it’s relatively rare for concessions to be offered in class-B or -C units, the markets with the most discounts overall logged inflated concession rates in these lower-tier product lines.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

August 26, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

August 26, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. The Key to Happy Customers? Happy Employees

We all know that customers are central to the fate of businesses. It’s captured in the maxim, coined by department store tycoons of the early 20th century, “The customer is always right.” Jeff Bezos, one of today’s most iconic businessmen, has laid Amazon’s incredible success at the feet of its obsession with customers, saying “You can be competitor-focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology-focused, you can be business-model-focused… But in my view, obsessive customer-focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”

As company leaders strive to put customers first, our latest research offers new insights into how that might be achieved: through engaged and happy employees.

Glassdoor knows a lot about employee experience. Studying our database of millions of insights about jobs, salaries, company ratings and reviews, we’ve quantified the impact of worker satisfaction on retention, talent attraction, stock performance, and more.

2. Why You Should Stop Paying For Gas With Your Debit Card

Another week, another data breach. The latest happened at Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based chain of gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operating throughout the Midwest.

Consequently, about 5.3 million stolen credit and debit cards from 35 U.S. states have hit the black market. "One of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale, reported cyber security investigative blogger Brian Krebs.

Over half of Americans (51%) primarily use debit cards to pay for gas at the pump, according to a recent study from GasBuddy,com. It's reasonable to estimate, then, that more than 2.65 million cards compromised in the Hy-Vee breach were debit cards.

In the GasBuddy study, respondents said the main reason they use debit cards at the pump is that it's so darn easy. Debit cards have no interest rates or fees. When you use your debit card, you’re authorizing your bank to give you immediate access the money in your account. You swipe your card, type in your PIN and the funds shoot out of your account immediately, like electronic cash.

3. The Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities Aren’t What You Think

When it comes to the economic status of cities, there is no shortage of conflicting messages—and conflicting facts. On the one hand, we hear about the dominance of superstar cities and tech hubs in the competition for talented workers, high-end knowledge jobs, and high-tech startups. On the other hand, Sunbelt cities continue to lead in the growth of population and jobs in general.

The reality is that most studies that purport to talk about cities are really talking about the performance of broader metropolitan areas, which are made of up core or principal cities and their surrounding suburbs and exurbs. Looking at cities by themselves is important and useful for several reasons.

For one, there is lots of talk these days about urban revitalization, the comeback of cities, and urban gentrification. But all of this is likely very uneven across U.S. cities, shaped by the same winner-take-all pattern that we see for metro areas. Some cities have bounced back and are experiencing growth in population and jobs, and in key dimensions of talent like college graduates and the creative class. But others continue to struggle and lose ground, whether to other cities or their own suburbs.

4. Yield Curve Inversion Might Be a Good Thing for CRE Investors

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The yield curve inversion can help borrowers in the commercial real estate industry, some industry sources say.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note dipped below the 2-year rate for a brief period on August 14 for the first time since 2007, causing fears of a looming recession. As of this morning, the yield on the 2-year Treasury was at 1.6 percent vs. a yield of approximately 1.59 percent on the 10-year notes. Yield curve inversions typically precede a recession by five to 18 months.

But continued economic growth and a healthy debt market are dividing real estate professionals and economists on if a recession is imminent, and whether the yield curve has grown unreliable as a forecasting tool.

5. Opportunity Zones: A Macro-Level Yet Still Hyperlocal Approach

Opportunity Zones are the newest pitch in real estate. But what opportunities and tax incentives can opportunity zones offer the investors?

No longer do investors have to decide whether they’re in the opportunity zone game to maximize social impact or financial return because they accomplish both by asking themselves these crucial questions: Do they want to invest in an established neighborhood or one with a likely chance of appreciating down the line? Do they want to invest in projects already off the ground, or help build from scratch? And, of course, what is the timing of their tax obligations?

The answers depend on the investment and the investor. One option that can do both – help community and investors – is a ground-up, hyperlocal approach that takes a macro view of a given opportunity zone. In this case, the focus should be on a diverse, multi-use set of developments rather than a one-off real estate buy.

Although a one-off investment in a residential development in San Jose would certainly make an impact, lasting social change takes a more comprehensive approach.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

August 19, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

August 19, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Coworking Firms Draw Tenants With Babysitting, Farm-to-Desk Dining

Long gone are the coworking days when it was enough to offer a cheap desk and maybe a beer keg.

At, for instance, The Wing, the coworking space designed for women, which will count at least 13 locations by year-end, members are offered showers, a roof deck, a beauty room, and even a recently-launched babysitting space called Little Wing that provides open play and story time for children and support groups for mothers. Now available in their Soho and West Hollywood locations, Little Wing will eventually be rolled out throughout the chain.

While these might seem extravagant for an office, they’re actually right in line with the sort of luxury amenities tenants can now expect from coworking spaces.

“When we were conceptualizing The Wing in the early days, one of the key considerations that was core to our business model was, ‘What are the things everyday working women need in order to be successful?’” said Zara Rahim, spokeswoman for The Wing. “Each of these experiences and parts of the physical space are answers to those questions.”

2. Co-working Operators Set for Expansion in the Southeast

The co-working sector continues to expand in the Southeast, piggybacking off the area’s job and population growth, according to industry sources.

“[Co-working space in the Southeast] is absolutely expected to continue to grow,” says Austin DuBois, assistant director of Workthere, an office space rental agency launched by real estate services firm Savills in 2017. “We are seeing more and more local and regional providers open their doors and we’re also seeing a lot of groups expand into new locations. So, the supply and demand are growing.”

As co-working’s dominant player WeWork prepares for its IPO filing, a recent Crain’s New York Business article argues that the deal will serve as a benchmark for the valuation of the entire co-working sector.

3. Why You Should Never Borrow Someone Else's Charging Cable

We've all been there. Your smartphone or tablet is low on power and you've left your charging cable at home. There's no harm in borrowing one from a fellow passenger in the airport departure lounge or from your hotel's front desk clerk, right?

In 2019, that would be a huge mistake, say cybersecurity experts.

“There are certain things in life that you just don't borrow,” says Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner and Head of X-Force Red at IBM Security. “If you were on a trip and realized you forgot to pack underwear, you wouldn't ask all your co-travelers if you could borrow their underwear. You'd go to a store and buy new underwear.”

Henderson runs a team of hackers that clients hire to break into their computer systems in order to expose vulnerabilities. Since cyberhackers have figured out how to implant charging cables with malware that can remotely hijack devices and computers, his team sometimes uses a trick to teach clients to be less trusting of third-party charging cables. “We might send somebody a swag iPhone cable in the mail. Maybe we have it branded as something innocuous, like a vendor or a partner that they have listed on their website. We send off the cable and see if the person plugs it in,” he says.

4. I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.

For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number.

We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member discount or at the pharmacy to pick up medication. When we sign up to use apps and websites, they often ask for our phone number to verify our identity.

This column will encourage a new exercise. Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk?

This question is crucial now that our primary phone numbers have shifted from landlines to mobile devices, our most intimate tools, which often live with us around the clock. Our mobile phone numbers have become permanently attached to us because we rarely change them, porting them from job to job and place to place.

5. Better Ways to Predict Who’s Going to Quit

Companies know that employee turnover is expensive and disruptive. And they know that retaining their best and brightest employees helps them not only save money but also preserve competitive advantages and protect intellectual capital.

Most retention efforts, however, rely on two retrospective tools. First, exit interviews are conducted to better understand why people chose to leave, though by this point, it is usually too late to keep them. Second, annual employee surveys are used to assess engagement. These survey results are later compared to people who left the organization, in the hopes that they will yield any relevant predictors of departures. The problem is that these data don’t give managers a real-time picture of who might be considering leaving.

Our latest research has focused on using big data and machine-learning algorithms to develop a turnover propensity index for individuals – a real-time indicator of who is likely thinking about quitting. We grounded the development of these predictive models in academic research on turnover and then conducted a series of studies.

Our results demonstrate that it is possible to develop indices that predict in real time the likelihood of a person to consider an outside offer and to eventually leave the firm.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

August 12, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

August 12, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Leading Change in a Company That’s Historically Bad At It

Organizational change was once a seasonal experience. But today, managing continual disruption is a skill required of most leaders. Change management is the new management, which makes doing it effectively that much more difficult.

Despite our extensive knowledge on the topic, failure rates among organizational change efforts remain high. Most reliable research estimates that 50%–70% of initiatives fall short, largely focusing on change implementation as the culprit.

Common obstacles that organizations face include failure to sustain the effort over the long term, competing priorities, and under-resourcing. But some seeds of failure are sewn long before change is implemented — and some initiatives are set up to fail the moment they are conceived.

2. How Phones Made the World Your Office, Like It or Not

Misplacing your car keys is worrisome, but it’s nothing like the free-fall panic of losing your phone. Hollywood could make a horror movie about somebody just looking for their iPhone XR and going slowly insane.

The telephone began to pervade our lives at the end of the 19th century, and then — as you can see in these photos from The New York Times’s archives — it became our lives. Cellphones were a significant inflection point. They made it possible for us to be available at virtually any moment, which was so extraordinary that most of us tacitly accepted that we should be available at virtually any moment.

History’s first call on a hand-held wireless phone was made on April 3, 1973, by a Motorola executive named Martin Cooper. Mr. Cooper had developed the phone himself and, having a cheeky streak, decided to step out onto Sixth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan, and call his rival at Bell Laboratories to gloat a little. Can you hear me now?

3. Going Beyond Hospitality

In the world of hotels, the lobby is a convenient hub for the vast array of services that the establishment provides, including checking in, checking out, and arranging transportation.

It often doubles as a communal multipurpose gathering place for the work and leisure activities of guests—providing a place where they can do everything from meeting with corporate clients to relaxing with a good cup of coffee and a book.

But Greenbelt, Maryland–based Bozzuto Group, a diversified real estate company that manages 72,000 apartments and 2 million square feet (186,000 sq m) of commercial space in East Coast cities and Chicago, has figured out that lobbies can provide similar—and even more expansive—benefits to residents of its apartment buildings.

Bozzuto employs interior designers from the hospitality field who emulate the flow and activation of space in hotel lobbies and often incorporate hotel-like features such as business centers and conference rooms to accommodate residents who are remote workers. One apartment community in Baltimore, Anthem House, features a coffee shop with tables that spill into the lobby as a way of activating that space.

4. How To Invest Like Blackstone: Four Industrial REITs Riding The Amazon Wave

Blackstone Group's record-breaking $18.7 billion bet on 179 million square feet of U.S. warehouse space is a bet on the future of online shopping.

As more and more Americans turn to internet retailers—e-commerce accounts for roughly 10% of total retail sales in the United States, up from 6% at the beginning of the decade—companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot are vying for the increasingly valuable real estate where they store and distribute their growing inventories. And most importantly, they're willing to outspend each other.

In what is now the largest private equity deal in history, Blackstone announced on Sunday that it will acquire the U.S. logistics assets of Singapore-based GLP, which has one of the largest real estate fund platforms in the world and $64 billion in assets. Blackstone's own real estate arm was already robust, with a $140 billion portfolio and hundreds of millions of square feet of hotel, retail, residential and office space under its control across the globe. According to Bloomberg, the deal will roughly double the firm's U.S. industrial footprint.

5. What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You

In America, the conventional wisdom of how to live healthily is full of axioms that long ago shed their origins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Get eight hours of sleep. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Two thousand calories a day is normal. Even people who don’t regularly see a doctor are likely to have encountered this information, which forms the basis of a cultural shorthand. Tick these boxes, and you’re a healthy person.

In the past decade, as pedometers have proliferated in smartphone apps and wearable fitness trackers, another benchmark has entered the lexicon: Take at least 10,000 steps a day, which is about five miles of walking for most people. As with many other American fitness norms, where this particular number came from has always been a little hazy. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a default daily goal for some of the most popular activity trackers on the market.

Now new research is calling the usefulness of the 10,000-step standard into question—and with it, the way many Americans think about their daily activities. While basic guidelines can be helpful when they’re accurate, human health is far too complicated to be reduced to a long chain of numerical imperatives. For some people, these rules can even do more harm than good.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

August 05, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

August 05, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. The Rise Of The Subcontractors: Labor Shortage Keeping Skilled Workers In Control

The labor shortage in the construction industry is one of the country's great, unsolved problems as the economic expansion has continued. While it has caused prices to shoot up, it has also created a new dynamic in which subcontractors are now arguably the most powerful entity on a job site.

For companies who provide specialized labor to construction companies, the Great Recession was a game-changer. And when it comes to pricing and availability, subcontractors — an industry that cycles between feast and famine — are expected to retain their power over pricing and timing for the foreseeable future.

“All of this is driven by workforce, manpower and skilled trades,” Associated General Contractors of Georgia CEO Mike Dunham said. “The [subcontractors] are just constrained by the sheer availability of skilled workers. I don't have anybody who doesn't need people. The subs right now are in the catbird seat. They are at an absolutely maximum capacity.”

2. Workplace as a Service: Workplace for the Future

The rise of flexible workspace solutions is fast becoming one of the principal disruptors in the modern world, with cost-savings and the ability to attract top staff changing the way companies do business

The word ‘disruption’ has become de rigueur in business circles in recent years.

From startups breaking into industries previously dominated by major global players, to the rapid advancement of technology and evolving working practices, the business world continues to be in a state of flux.

But while many may associate disruption with technological advancement, it’s actually how we work that is becoming one of the central drivers of this revolution, with flexible working due to eclipse artificial intelligence as a key disruptor in the 2020s.

The era when employees were happy to work in packed offices, 9-6, day-after-day is coming to an end. Now more than ever, the modern employee prizes flexibility.

3. Best Practices: Getting Out Of An Investment When The Getting Is Good

Nothing lasts forever, including commercial real estate assets' most productive years. Determining exactly when the best time is to sell a CRE asset is, however, as much art as science.

What are the most important considerations in how long to hold a property, and how do you determine the best exit strategy?

We put that question to executives at six CRE investment companies, of various sizes and holding various property types.

4. Millennial Sleeping Habits Are Changing The Modern Workplace: Here's How

I've written before about how millennials are changing the workplace in terms of technology use, cultural attitudes, and even the distribution of the workforce.

But there’s a subtle way millennials could be reshaping the workplace, and it might be beneficial for everyone: it’s all in how they sleep.

There are some conflicting reports on how often millennials sleep, but the general consensus is that they’re sleeping more hours of the day. For example, one study by the American Bureau of Labor Statistics found that millennials are sleeping an average of 25 minutes longer each night. With the average American sleeping 6.8 hours per night, that propels millennials straight into the recommended “7 to 9 hours” category.

Compared to other generational groupings, millennials are doing well in terms of the number of total hours slept. Generation X members appear to be the worst. However, millennials are also reporting higher levels of stress, casting some doubt on the true quality of the sleep they’re getting—but for now, let’s focus on the positives.

5. Now Calling Balls and Strikes: Robot Umpires

Dominick Reuter for the Wall Street Journal

Facing a 3-2 count in the seventh inning here Friday night, T.J. Rivera of the Long Island Ducks let a borderline changeup pass by, tossed his bat away and jogged toward first base. He thought he had drawn a walk to break up a perfect game by opposing pitcher Rick Teasley of the Somerset Patriots.

Five steps down the line, Rivera heard home plate umpire J.B. Torres deliver those two dreaded words: strike three. Rivera glared back at Torres, preparing to plead his case, when he remembered an important detail: Torres didn’t actually make the call. A little voice in Torres’s head told him to do it.

“[Rivera] said to me, ‘I was trying to get that walk, but I forgot it’s not on you tonight—it’s on the computer,’” Torres said.

Baseball’s future has arrived in the Atlantic League, a collection of eight independent professional teams that span from New Britain, Conn., to Sugar Land, Texas. In February, the Atlantic League reached a three-year agreement to audition a series of experimental rules for Major League Baseball to evaluate, largely designed to improve pace of play and generate action. These include the prohibition of mound visits and defensive shifts, shorter inning breaks and enabling hitters to “steal” first base on any pitch not successfully caught in the air.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

July 29, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

July 29, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. How Not to Run a Panel

Over the past few years, I’ve participated in about a hundred panels. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve listened to—or, let’s be honest, endured—hundreds more. Most of them had one thing in common: They sucked.

I could write a whole book about the panels that have gone wrong in particularly strange or hilarious fashion: the one where the moderator fell asleep. The one where the opening statements lasted longer than the time allotted for the whole event. The one, high up on the 10th floor, when the acrobatic window washer stole the show.

These exotic horrors notwithstanding, I disagree with Leo Tolstoy: Every unhappy panel is unhappy in some of the same ways.

You know the scene. First come the long introductions. Then five people give opening statements of steadily increasing length. After that is a “conversation” in which the panelists talk past one another, sticking to the same old points they have made dozens of times before. This is followed by a few incoherent rants from the angriest members of the audience (question mark optional). Finally, a polite round of applause, which is anticipated with the same resigned longing as the saving bell on the last day of school.

It doesn’t have to be like that. At their rare best, panels can actually be fun and informative.

2. Leadership | Becoming a Visionary: What it Takes to be a CRE Thought Leader

When Lawrence Fink speaks, executives listen. Not just because he is CEO of BlackRock, one of the largest money management firms in the world, although that certainly has something to do it with it. Rather, over the years Fink has become renown for the advice he dispenses in his much anticipated annual letter to CEOs. In 2018, for instance, he set the investing world on its head when he told CEOs that their companies need to do more than just make profits—they also need to contribute to society. Granted, Fink said this with the might of $6 trillion in assets under management behind him and the very pointed observation that if companies want to receive backing or support from BlackRock they will take heed of his words.

But Fink’s letter last year and the one this year was seen as more than just marketing or one executive expounding on the issues.

Fink set off a debate in offices around the world about the company’s purpose and what it owes society—a debate that arguably has helped lead to a renewed corporate commitment to environment, social and governance issues.

This year’s missive was of a similar theme: “Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitive social and political issues—especially as they see governments failing to do so effectively,” he wrote. This indeed is a current trend that Fink is highlighting, which is what thought leaders do.

3. Amazon's Revolutionary Retail Strategy? Recycling Old Ideas

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’ desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes would have been turned into a team and maybe a product.

Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old. And we can forget how many of the slightly dusty incumbent retailers we all grew up with were also once considered radical, daring, piratical new businesses that made people angry with their new ideas.

This goes back to the beginning of mass retail. In Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, a tremendously entertaining novel about the creation of department stores in 1860s Paris, Octave Mouret builds a small shop into a vast new enterprise, dragging it into existence through force of will, inspiration, and genius. In the process, he creates fixed pricing, discounts, marketing, advertising, merchandising, display, and something called "returns." He sends out catalogs across the country. His staff is appalled that he wants to sell a new fabric at less than cost. "That’s the whole idea!" he shouts. Loss leaders are nothing new.

4. Economics Isn’t Dismal. It’s Useful.

In an annual rite of passage, over a million Americans will enroll in their first economics class in the fall, and as the field of economics has evolved, these introductory classes are changing, too.

Many economists these days view what we are teaching not so much as a specific subject matter but as a set of analytic tools that are relevant beyond the relatively standardized production and pricing decisions of the business world. This perspective has led modern economists to study families, education and health, much as they study business strategy, politics, and finance.

This broader ambit for economic reasoning provides an opportunity to make introductory economic courses more useful to more students, exploring how these ideas can inform the thousands of decisions they confront each day.

This approach requires a shift in vision. As an undergraduate, I was taught from the perspective of a spectator in the nosebleed seats watching the economic action unfold below. But economics is more useful if we teach students to see themselves as protagonists on the economic playing field.

5. Decoding the Ideal Workspace for Millennials

The millennial workforce is often tagged with the misconception of being easily distracted and unmotivated. Thus, a challenge which most businesses face in unlocking their true potential. They yearn autonomy, and if one applies the paradigm to the way they like to work, it becomes quite obvious why they love the idea of coworking spaces.

Inherently collaborative and flexible by nature, coworking has observed many new trends and unique practices over the years. They are the new hub for India’s ever-dynamic millennials who seek an adequate/ ideal spectrum of work and play amalgamation. Organisations today are striving to make their workplace the ideal environment for employees to flourish, and coworking spaces have proved to be an ideal propeller in workspace productivity and collaboration.

Led by the emerging Gen Z population, the workforce of India has gradually evolved and so have workspaces where desks are no longer limited to its primary utility and every employee desires a holistically driven workplace.

With a relatively conducive working environment in place, modern offices in the form of coworking spaces are more responsive to workers’ needs and are not confined to physical locations amidst emerging mobility solutions provided by leading players in the segment.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

July 22, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

July 22, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. How Gen Z Influences Your Office Design

At last year's CoreNet Global Conference in Boston , CoreNet chairman and Ernst & Young's Americas leader David Kamen remarked that corporate real estate spaces are now being designed to suit the generation of Americans that are currently in high school.

It makes sense—considering the fact that landlords are demanding longer lease commitments that commonly stretch from 10 to 15 years. And as office styles change regularly, corporate real estate professionals are wondering which trends are here to stay.

According to market research, the group most likely to influence the next evolution of office design is Gen Z. The youngest members of that group are currently sophomores in high school, and the oldest are 23 years old. They look at the world very differently from millennials.

2. I’ve been designing offices for decades. Here’s what I got wrong

Slack [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy O+A]

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the moment it all went wrong. Or maybe that’s too extreme—the moment it all got crazy. And I keep coming back to the term “24/7.”

It was the year I graduated from high school, 1983. That same year, according to the Oxford dictionary, Jerry Reynolds, a basketball player for the Milwaukee Bucks, coined the term “24/7” describing his dunk shot that he claimed he could make 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anytime, any day. Whatever the merits of this claim, his phrase was a slam dunk—it caught on instantly.

About 10 years later Primo Orpilla and I had just started our interior design practice Studio O+A, and one of our earliest technology clients, a young highly motivated CEO, wanted to get more out of his employees. To that end, he asked us to design an office that would encourage staff to stay longer and get more work done.

Besides creating a cafeteria that could accommodate serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner (the first time we had heard of three squares as an office perk), we incorporated a number of spaces to make the office more comfortable for a long-term stay. This may have been the beginning of the 24/7 office. It was certainly the moment when amenity spaces took off.

Fast forward another decade. Open offices are in full swing, and so are their critics. O+A is firmly established as a creator of work environments with an almost endless variety of amenity spaces.

3. How to Reach Out to Someone Whose Career You Admire

We all have professional idols we’d like to meet. Sometimes we might luck into getting to say hello at a conference or having a mutual friend who can introduce us. But often, despite our suspicions that we have a lot in common with and could even be friends with our heroes, they remain out of reach.

I’ve been on both sides of the equation. Readers have emailed me about wanting to connect, and I’ve done my share of approaching people I admire without seeming like a groupie or a stalker. I’ve found four strategies to be effective in connecting with high-profile strangers, even without the benefit of a warm introduction.

Establish your credibility. When you send a networking request, it’s important to immediately set yourself apart as someone worth knowing. For instance, when I recently wrote to a prominent film director, I started the note by citing our shared alumni affiliation and — because I wanted to inquire about adapting one of his films into a musical — mentioning the prominent shows that had been created by graduates of the musical theater workshop I’m in. He responded, expressed interest in talking further, and noted that a composer friend had told him that “many exciting works have come out of this program.” By establishing your credibility up front, you make it clear that the interaction will be fruitful.

4. Seven Habits Of Extra Interesting People

Indeed, anyone can learn to become more interesting, which is a wonderful thing, because being interesting can help you strengthen your network, win more clients, and lead more effectively.

There are several habits that many interesting people have in common. Sometimes these habits form naturally, but they are more often than not the result of conscious effort. Here’s what interesting people do to make themselves engaging, unusual and hypnotizing.

They are passionate. Jane Goodall, a bona fide interesting person, left her home in England and moved to Tanzania at age 26 to begin studying chimpanzees. It became her life’s work, and Goodall has devoted herself fully to her cause while inspiring many others to do the same. Interesting people don’t just have interests; they have passions, and they devote themselves completely to them.

5. The Deeper Significance of the Mall on Stranger Things

When Stranger Things’ Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown) sets foot in her town’s brand-new mall for the first time, she is equally overwhelmed and dazzled. Her friend Max (Sadie Sink) steers her to The Gap and watches Eleven touch everything in sight. Finally, Eleven pauses to stare at a mannequin. “How do I know what I like?” the young, telekinetic girl asks. “You just try things on until you find something that feels like you. Not Hopper. Not Mike,” Max explains gently, referencing Eleven’s adoptive father and boyfriend. “You.”

Netflix’s nostalgic sci-fi series introduces significant changes in Season 3: It’s the summer of 1985, and the nerdy kids who once played Dungeons & Dragonshave blossomed into mall-going tweens, albeit ones who face supernatural monsters and Soviet agents along with the typical pains of growing up. Their fictional hometown of Hawkins, Indiana, is changing, too—thanks to a flashy new shopping center called Starcourt, which arrives just as the United States is experiencing a historic boom in mall construction.

Before consumers started flocking to the internet two decades later, Hollywood sought to capture the role that malls played in American teens’ lives. It was inevitable that Stranger Things, a show steeped in 1980s culture, would add to this canon with its own montage.

Eleven and Max’s shopping scenes map onto a rich history of malls in movies and TV shows such as Clueless and Mean Girls. On-screen and off, places like Starcourt served as a rare middle ground between school and home, offering teenagers independence and a chance to experiment, via stores selling clothes and accessories, with self-expression. Most mall montages focus on transformation, and Stranger Things is no different. By the end of the sequence, Eleven has traded her worn button-down for an on-trend jumpsuit splashed with geometric shapes.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

July 15, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

July 15, 2019/ Ken Ashley

1. Duke Long’s Updated 2019 Top 150 Commercial Real Estate People You Must Connect With On LinkedIn and Duke Long’s Updated: 2019 Top 100 Commercial Real Estate People You Must Follow On Twitter

I am humbled to be named No. 38 on Duke’s list of the top people to connect with on LinkedIn and No. 4 on his list of the top commercial real estate people you must follow on Twitter.

2. The Power of One Push-Up

The numbers used to assess health are, for the most part, not helpful.

There are the vital signs: heart and respiratory rates and body temperature. Sometimes blood pressure. These are critical in emergencies. If you’ve been stabbed in the chest, paramedics want to know no numbers more than these.

But in day-to-day life, the normalcy of those numbers is expected. It doesn’t so much grant you a clean bill of health as indicate that you are not in acute danger. What if you just generally want to know whether you’re on pace to live an average life or longer?

Except in extreme cases, no single number gives a good idea of whether a person is functionally healthy or not. The common numbers are not directly or easily changeable. As these numbers continue to dominate health care, however, an emerging body of evidence is finding useful and cheap numbers that anyone can track. If these new numbers aren’t being taken seriously, it may be because they seem too obvious.

3. The Wrong Ways to Strengthen Culture

Compared with some other activities of business leaders, such as hiring the right talent and setting strategy, changing corporate culture can be especially challenging. Culture is amorphous; there are no direct levers for shifting it in one direction or another. Indications are that CEOs are putting a higher priority on this aspect of leadership than in the past.

According to a study by the research and advisory firm Gartner, CEOs mentioned culture 7% more often during earnings conference calls in 2016 than in 2010. In surveys both CEOs and CHROs say that “managing and improving the culture” is the top priority for talent management.

But the data suggests that there’s lots of room for improvement: Each year companies spend $2,200 per employee, on average, on efforts to improve the culture (much of the money goes to consultants, surveys, and workshops)—but only 30% of CHROs report a good return on that investment.

When trying to spearhead culture change, many leaders use the wrong tools. Having surveyed more than 7,500 employees and nearly 200 HR leaders at global companies and conducted in-depth interviews with 100 HR leaders, Gartner has written a report identifying the most- (and the least-) effective ways leaders try to transform culture. To increase their odds of success, the report advises, they should avoid three mistakes.

4. What Startup Employees Can Teach the Rest of Us About Work

In the 1950s, the average age of a company on the S&P 500 index was 60. Today, that number is 20. This means that the most successful corporations are growing three times faster than they have in the past. To succeed at this rate of rapid change, employees and business leaders have had to adapt by adopting growth mindsets, learning new skills, and embracing flexibility. Where stability and long-term planning were once the mark of a sound strategy, adaptability is the new competitive advantage.

This need for adaptability is not new, though it doesn’t come easy to everyone. Over the past two decades, many large companies have failed to evolve and seen their business margins, market share, and profitability suffer — sometimes leading to devastating results.

So why are some companies able to evolve while others struggle? I argue that it comes down to who you hire. Fundamentally, leaders with a growth mindset believe intelligence and success can be learned, while those with a fixed mindset believe that these are static traits over which they have little control.

In the context of a large company that is seeing increasingly volatile business results, leaders with a growth mindset are far more likely to adapt, push for change, and encourage others do the same — a skill that is needed to succeed in today’s workforce.

5. How Hot-Desking Will Kill Your Company

(Photo by Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Photo credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

If you hate your company, its employees and the shareholders then go ahead and introduce the latest management fad: Hot-desking.

It's a better way to destroy the firm than inviting Russian hackers to rob you blind. The bigger the company, the faster the damage will occur with hot-desking.

Hot-desking is a working arrangement where employees have no assigned desk. Each morning you get a workstation based on that old standby, first-come-first-served. If you show up at 5:30 a.m. then you'll likely have your pick. Later than 9 a.m., then probably you'll get what’s left even if that means working apart from your colleagues.

The theory behind this idea is that it provides companies with increased flexibility in managing office space.

With some exceptions, the drawbacks vastly outweigh any benefits. I know this having witnessed decades in corporate jobs, including a role at one employer that implemented such idiocy.

Here’s what you need to know.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

March 25, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

March 25, 2019/ kenashley

March 25th, 2019

Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?

“Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. Like many Americans above grammar-school age, I seldom write by hand anymore, outside of barely legible grocery lists. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas. And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out.The sticky, white fluid and its chief rival, Liquid Paper, are peculiar anachronisms, throwbacks to the era of big hair, big cars, and big office stationery budgets. They were designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. Even paper is disappearing from the modern office, as more and more functions are digitized. But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10 percent in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. It’s a mystery of the digital age."

www.theatlantic.com Correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10 percent in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. It’s a mystery of the digital age.

DAVID PLATER UK / GETTY

No One Asks the Top CEOs Where They Went to College

Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton). And that’s not all. We tend to think of the founders of technology companies as having all gone to Stanford University (or dropping out of Harvard University). And yes, many of them did. But Michael Dell went to the University of Texas. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Marc Andreessen went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So did Larry Ellison, though he never graduated.

www.crainschicago.com Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton)

The Worlds Most Successful People Don't Actually Start Work at 4 a.m. They Wake and Work Whenever the (Heck) They Decide

"Apple CEO Tim Cook starts his morning routine -- not just his morning, his morning routine -- at 3:45. General Motors CEO Mary Barra gets to the office by 6 a.m. Best-selling author Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, etc.) gets up at 4 a.m., has a smoothie and a cup of bulletproof coffee, and then grinds away.

Clearly, waking up early works for them.

But not for everyone.

As Adam Grant says, "The world's most successful people aren't worried about what time others wake up. They wake and work on the schedule that works for them."

What seems right for early birds may not be right for you, because what time you start your day has nothing to do with your level of success.

Success is all about what you accomplish -- and, just as important, how you choose to accomplish it.”

www.inc.com

The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs

"When the kids in Skyler’s school want to tell a friend something in class, they don’t scrawl a note down on a tiny piece of paper and toss it across the room. They use Google Docs.

“We don’t really pass physical notes anymore,” said Skyler, 15, who, like all the other students in this story, is identified by a pseudonym.

SHUTTERSTOCK

As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs." www.theatlantic.com

How to Make Your Open Office Less Annoying

"You know you’re in an open-plan office when you click on an article that will allow you to hate-read about open offices, then kind of hide your computer screen with the top half of your torso so that your colleagues don’t realize just how much you’re not a team player.You know you’re in an open office because you’re trying to write a sensitive email while wedged between one coworker making a gynecologist appointment and another picking tuna-fish salad out of his Invisalign.The office’s openness is never more real to you than when you try to have a private conversation with the intern about the office dress code, only to further expose the entire office—to a lesson in micro-generational social norms and the definition of a “cold-shoulder top.”

Around 70 percent of offices in the United States are open-concept, according to the BBC, even though these paper-pushing panopticons make us more likely to get sick, and make us less likely to be ... uh, what was I saying ... productive. Because of all the distractions.

www.theatlantic.com

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

March 11, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

March 11, 2019/ kenashley

March 11th, 2019

There's Only One Blockbuster Store Left in the Entire World

“Blockbuster was once one of the largest retailers in the world. It helped move the consumers' ability to watch movies from the theater to the home, via stores that offered videotapes of mainline films for rent. Eventually, it was buried by Netflix and other companies that offered DVDs via mail, and then the emergence of streaming. Two Blockbuster stores survived as of this week. One will close later this month, and that leaves only one left in the world.

Blockbuster was founded in 1985. At its peak, in 2004, it had over 9,000 stores. About half of those were in the United States. Blockbuster's employee count in the same year was 84,000, which is nearly triple what Google parent Alphabet has today. www.usatoday.com

The exterior of a Blockbuster video rental store is seen February 10, 2004 in San Francisco. Soon there will be only one Blockbuster location left in the world, a store in Bend, Oregon.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images)

Heads Up, Real Estate World, Driverless Cars Are Coming

"...to get these vehicles fully driverless will take longer to develop than the low-speed autonomous shuttles. These cars would be an advantage for suburban areas, helping to increase real estate values further away from urban centers with faster travel time and more options.

However, the transportation information entrepreneur warns planning ahead for this technology is critical. Within dense urban areas, it could increase traffic, congestion and parking problems. This would require appropriate charges for driving and parking within the city.“Very strong leadership would need to be ahead of this,” warns Matt Caywood. “People don’t worry about things until it becomes a problem. At that point it becomes a really big problem.” www.globest.com Matt Caywood, CEO of TransitScreen

Elon Musk Had a Great Week

“Elon Musk can exhale.

The entrepreneur has been on edge since SpaceX launched a spacecraft to the International Space Station last weekend. The launch went smoothly, the Falcon 9 rocket lighting up the night sky like a flare in the darkness. And SpaceX spacecraft have visited the space station more than a dozen times before, to deliver supplies and science instruments to the astronauts on board. But this mission was unlike the others. The spacecraft that launched on Saturday was designed to carry humans." www.theatlantic.com

Parachutes soften the descent of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft on its return to Earth.

NASA

1B SF Of New Industrial Deliveries Not Enough To Satisfy Demand

"Industrial tenants want more space and they want it now."

Industrial supply nationwide is through the roof — with nearly 1B SF of new space coming online during the last three years — but it isn't enough, according to a report.

Despite the surge in supply, there was positive net absorption in 43 of the 47 markets that were tracked during 2018. During the fourth quarter, 40 markets enjoyed positive net absorption. www.bisnow.com

The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

Two pieces of bread—one spread with peanut butter and one spread with jelly

YURIY GOLUB / SHUTTERSTOCK

"So there is nothing wrong with this habit. In fact, there are many things right with it. I spoke with about half a dozen people who, at one time or another, have eaten the same thing for lunch every day. Together, their stories form a defense of a practice that is often written off as uninspired.Many of the people I talked with emphasized the stress-reducing benefits of eating the same thing each day. Amanda Respers, a 32-year-old software developer in Newport News, Virginia, once ate a variation on the same home-brought salad (a lettuce, a protein, and a dressing) at work for about a year. She liked the simplicity of the formula, but the streak ended when she and her now-husband, who has more of an appetite for variety, moved in together six years ago. Would she still be eating the salad every day if she hadn’t met him? “Oh heck yeah,” she told me. “It would’ve saved so much time.

"www.theatlantic.com

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

March 04, 2019

Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

March 04, 2019/ kenashley

March 4th, 2019

Stressed at Work? Mentoring a Colleague Could Help

“Our experiment results showed that people who served as mentors experienced lower levels of anxiety, and described their job as more meaningful, than those who did not mentor. We learned from our interviews that mentoring afforded senior (officials) a venue for discussing and reflecting on concerns. Mentors heard their mentees’ accounts of anxiety and realized these feelings — which they also shared — were commonplace. By acknowledging that these anxieties were common, both mentees and mentors grew more comfortable in discussing them and in sharing different coping mechanisms. Mentors often found their interactions with junior colleagues therapeutic."

www.bisnow.com By acknowledging that these anxieties were common, both mentees and mentors grew more comfortable in discussing them and in sharing different coping mechanisms.

ZHAO HUI/GETTY IMAGES

Real Estate Giants Try to be More Like WeWork

"...at Dock 72, an innovative new building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard where WeWork’s custom co-working offices and Rise by We fitness studio will soon fill a third of the square footage, landlords are claiming a small victory. The building, co-owned by Boston Properties and Rudin Management, has its own tech. Rudin’s technology subsidiary, Prescriptive Data, has developed a mobile app to serve as tenants’ main portal for interacting with the building.

For Dock 72, Rudin developed a mobile app to serve as tenants’ main portal for interacting with the building. [Image: courtesy of Boston Properties]The Dock 72 app will allow tenants and their employees to enter the building, register guests, book fitness classes at the in-house studio, order and pay for food at the cafeteria, book shared conference rooms, and submit work orders for maintenance issues. Data from the app will also provide the property’s operators and managers with real-time insights into the patterns of users, helping to improve building services and performance. With the app, Michael Rudin, senior vice president of Rudin Management Company, says he wants the building to be cashless.” www.fastcompany.com

With the app…Rudin Management Company, wants the building to be cashless

Canyon Ranch to Bring Its Trailblazing Wellness Model to Senior Living

"Canyon Ranch is entering senior living at a time when many operators are reconfiguring their operations to focus on wellness. Based on what he has seen in the resort industry, Milner is confident that Canyon Ranch will provide a more robust and time-tested offering than potential competitors, however.

Photo credit CanyonRanch and Leisuremanagement.co

“Resorts would claim to have spas or wellness programs and when you really looked under the marketing and looked at substance, there [was] not much there,” he said. “So, I’m not educated enough yet on senior housing as a segment [to know] how serious these wellness programs are, and I hope there are some really serious players in it, but I certainly know there’s not anybody with our wellness background and skill set in the market." www.seniorhousingnews.com

A Historic Rocket Launch Lights Up the Night; SpaceX is one step closer to returning human spaceflight to U.S. soil.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—The stars were out over the marshlands near the launchpad. Crickets trilled a steady melody, interrupted by the occasional squawk of a bird flying low over the water. Except for a few pops of lightning, the sky was a very deep blue, almost black. It was, by all appearances, nighttime.

Then came a burst of blinding light.

A SpaceX rocket ignited its engines just before 3 a.m. ET on Saturday and rose like a ball of fire against the sky. A gold-colored glow spread across the horizon, like a racing sunrise in the middle of the night.

For the first time, a commercially built spacecraft designed to carry humans has launched to the International Space Station. www.theatlantic.com

The American flag stands upright on the surface of the moon.

NASA Is Rushing to the Moon

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER / NASA" The Trump administration wants to put humans on the moon by 2028. Unlike the Apollo program, this won’t be an in-house effort. NASA has asked American aerospace companies to submit designs for transportation systems that could be launched and tested, without a crew, as early as 2024. Applications are due in late March, and the winners stand to receive contracts worth from $300,000 to $9 million. Potential participants include longtime NASA contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman; the quirky-billionaire-owned SpaceX and Blue Origin; and smaller, more obscure companies." www.theatlantic.com

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!