1) Stay Positive
2) You Can Do It
3) Please
4) How Can I Help?
5) Thank You
6) I’ve Got Your Back
7) I Believe in You
8) I Love You
9) You Matter
10) The Best is Yet to Come
Stay well, friends and happy holidays to all that celebrate.
This post inspired by Jon Gordon
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson
Yes, the black swan happened, and the entire world changed in a matter of a few weeks. Yes, there is fear and terrible sickness in our land. Yes, the markets are a mess. Let’s not even talk about our investments. It’s just a desperate and weird time.
As a result, mental health is front and center and something millions are dealing with now. This component of health is a major crisis that you and I are going to have to deal with head on and soon.
I’m going to make the hopeful assumption that you and your family are physically healthy or on the mend. Based on statistical probability you are likely healthy, for now. If not, prayers for your recovery.
Given the assumption of physical health, what are we to do as business leaders in the coming weeks and months? Do we allow ourselves to be mired in fear and loathing? Do we succumb to the panic and desperation that are ruining the lives of millions? Or, is there another mindset that we could adopt?
I’ve been thinking about this hard for days now and I want to share some ideas with you. Instead of miring in desperation, I vote that we go a different direction and become what I am calling practically positive.
Put a Pep in Your Step
This approach of becoming practically positive acknowledges the rough things that are happening in our world. But my suggested way of thinking allows us to still move ahead to defeat fear and seek out joy and happiness in life.
We start by looking under every rock to find the good things in life. Psychologists call this approach “reframing.” I call it the right thing to do every day, but especially in the days and weeks ahead.
Here are a few tips, partially provided from my friend Tommy Newberry (who wrote a whole book about Joy):
Actively seek positive mental nutrition by looking for positive news, great happenings in our world and the amazing human kindness that is springing to life around the globe. There are many resources, but here is just one idea: check out Some Good News by John Kransiski
Write down 10 things you are grateful for every morning. Keep the list in your pocket and refresh every few days. The more you do this, the more you will train your brain to look for the good in your life.
Do away with the survival mindset and instead shift your brain to thriving in the near future.
Use the current difficulty to accelerate personal growth. Purified gold is the result of great heat. Get in top physical shape, get extra sleep and nurture your relationships with those closest to you.
Downshift to a short-term focus over the next 30 days. Make peace with your current long-term goals as they will shift; they will be different, but I bet better in coming months.
Make yourself more valuable by upgrading your business systems through online training. You should be the ninja of your technology after the virus is over.
If you’re a person of faith, now is the time to deepen your relationship with God.
Yoga and meditation are proven ways to provide calm and peace.
Think of the “OBT” - – One Big Thing you can do during this time, now that time is not so much of an issue. Write a book, learn a language, or learn to ballroom dance with your partner (there are many, many virtual resources to help with these and others).
Practice Good Fact Hygiene
Fear is running through the country and made worse with every screaming headline. I came across the idea of “fact hygiene” listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Fresh Air. Host Terry Gross interviewed virus expert Max Brooks. At the very end of the interview, Max made the following statement which made me sit straight up:
“Be careful who we listen to, because panic can spread much faster than a virus. We have to be careful (with information) just as if it were the virus. We also have to be careful what we put back out, as if we were spreading the virus. We cannot pass along rumors or misinformation. We must be critically careful not to scare people into doing irrational and dangerous things.”
We need to listen to experts like:
CDC
WHO
Dr. Anthony Fauci/ Dr. Deborah Birx
Local public health officials.
What we cannot listen to:
Random facts on the internet
Whispered conspiracy theories, many times about interventions by the US military or trampling of American’s rights.
Your uncle who knows a guy who knows a guy who heard that something terrible is happening or that “they” are not telling us everything.
Wash your hands and watch where you get your facts.
Down, But Not Out
We are not out for even a minute, people. Let’s do an “audit” of some of the things we, as a society, should be excited about:
If you live in the United States, we have highly advanced medicine and thousands of healthcare heroes who are standing by our side. The supplies of PPE’s and other tools needed are coming and in days ahead this problem will abate.
American ingenuity is alive and well. Look at just two examples: Tesla developed a new ventilator in six days and Abbot Labs developed a Covid-19 test that delivers results in 5 minutes. There are thousands of other examples of ingenuity...take a look around and you will be amazed.
Fiscal stimulus and the CARES Act will invest trillions in our economy. We learned from 2009 and lawmakers are being much more aggressive as “economic firefighters” this time around.
All of science is focused on Covid-19. This great article from the NYTimes says “Never before, scientists say, have so many of the world’s researchers focused so urgently on a single topic. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt.”
Hope Actually IS a Strategy
We live in amazing times, and we’ve seen the United States survive all manner of wars, attacks, depressions and evil plots. And yet we are the strongest nation on earth.
And you? You and I will be remembered by history and by our community for the choices we make in the coming weeks.
You are a leader in your family, your community and your company. People notice how you react. Strength and leadership now may make you the hero you thought you were when you were nine years old. Be the real hero of 2020.
You will certainly have a story to tell when this virus is all over. And make some extra room in a drawer for your cape.
“Don’t worry, bout a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be alright.” Bob Marley
Note: These are my personal views and not necessarily those of Cushman & Wakefield
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.
Stas Knop/Pexels
Like many families have recently, ours scheduled a virtual happy hour the other night. It was full of the same sarcastic jokes and crossing conversations we’d have at a family dinner, only it was all through screens. For an hour or so, there was laughter and relief. The next day, my brother-in-law texted to ask what time happy hour would start.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but what we’d done is enter into a ritual as a way to cope with the anxiety and grief produced by the current pandemic. Rituals, it turns out, are a powerful human mechanism for managing extreme emotions and stress, and we should be leaning on them now.
To understand how rituals work and how we can adopt and adapt them, I turned to Mike Norton. Mike is a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied rituals and their effects on our wellbeing. The following conversation is edited lightly for clarity.
The coronavirus is not only a health crisis of immense proportion—it’s also an imminent restructuring of the global economic order. Here’s how leaders can begin navigating to what’s next.
“For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.”
These words were written 11 years ago, amid the last global financial crisis, by one of our former managing partners, Ian Davis. They ring true today but if anything, understate the reality the world is currently facing.
It is increasingly clear our era will be defined by a fundamental schism: the period before COVID-19 and the new normal that will emerge in the post-viral era: the “next normal.” In this unprecedented new reality, we will witness a dramatic restructuring of the economic and social order in which business and society have traditionally operated. And in the near future, we will see the beginning of discussion and debate about what the next normal could entail and how sharply its contours will diverge from those that previously shaped our lives.
During the coronavirus crisis, those of us who can work from home are video chatting, a lot. We’ve covered the WFH tech tips you need, along with the joys and exhaustion of our new screen-based reality. Now let’s talk about how to video chat. If you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.
If your laptop gets loud or hot while chatting, unplug accessories and close applications. Try disconnecting your external displays or charger. On some devices, they can cause temperatures to rise, prompting internal fans to spin.
Video chatting can be processor intensive. It’s good to close any unnecessary browser tabs. I sometimes also close Slack. Check the Activity Monitor on Mac and Task Manager in Windows to see what applications are putting a strain on your computer.
Francois Mori/Associated Press
Using flag-draped memes and military terminology, the Trump administration and its Chinese counterparts have cast coronavirus research as national imperatives, sparking talk of a biotech arms race.
The world’s scientists, for the most part, have responded with a collective eye roll.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” said Jonathan Heeney, a Cambridge University researcher working on a coronavirus vaccine.
“That isn’t how things happen,” said Adrian Hill, the head of the Jenner Institute at Oxford, one of the largest vaccine research centers at an academic institution.
While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history. Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt.
Normal imperatives like academic credit have been set aside. Online repositories make studies available months ahead of journals. Researchers have identified and shared hundreds of viral genome sequences. More than 200 clinical trials have been launched, bringing together hospitals and laboratories around the globe.
An Evolving Situation. With an onslaught of rapidly changing information, economic and legislative activity, and governmental intervention, we understand that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on your business may be significant.
We understand these challenges may include complete or partial loss of use (whether by governmental mandate, landlord action, or corporate directive); loss of income; service disruptions; construction and delivery delays; holdover; and increased health-safety and sanitation costs.
We realize that in the wake of these challenges, many of you are wondering if and how your financial obligations under your leases might be alleviated, either by the lease language itself or through your insurance policies. The determination of these solutions is further complicated by the rapidly evolving body of pending and proposed legislation, economic relief programs and governmental actions.
In our view, tenants should consider keeping meticulous records of any issues related to COVID-19 such as complete or partial loss of use (noting dates, durations, and cause of closure) or notices from landlords of actual or potential exposure to COVID-19 within the building (including dates of discovery, notice, and closure, and any remedial actions taken). Such documentation may prove helpful during discussions with your landlords and advisors, and in connection with any filing of insurance or legal claims or applications for emergency funding.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
CBS News
Want to look professional in the age of coronavirus? Tops and bottoms are required.
With millions of Americans now working from home, the formalities of the office have slipped a little. Pat Brown, the CEO of $4 billion startup Impossible Foods, recently conducted a video call from his son’s bedroom while wearing a hoodie and T-shirt.
Participants on video meetings report getting distracted by what’s behind the person speaking. “Is that a bottle of nose spray on the shelf?” Adam Meshberg, the founder and principal of Brooklyn-based architecture and design firm Meshberg Group, asked himself recently while peering to see what was behind a caller on a virtual meeting. He advises clients to remember they are inviting people into their homes they never would otherwise and should thus curate by eliminating anything too personal. While a completely blank white wall would look strange, so would family photos or a painting of a nude, he says.
Weirdly, things haven’t changed much,” says Kyle Mathews as he sprays disinfectant on his hands. At least at work. His startup, Gatsby, helps websites manage content in the cloud. It has no headquarters and its 50-odd employees straddle the world, from Mr Mathews’s home in Berkeley, California, to Siberia.
Such “fully distributed” firms were on the rise before covid-19. As national lockdowns spread, conventional ones are forced into similar arrangements. Those that have grown up this way offer lessons.
Distributed organisations are as old as the internet. Its first users 50 years ago realised how much can be done by swapping emails and digital files. These exchanges led to the development of “open source” software, jointly written by groups of strangers often geographically distant.
Fast Company
As the country responds to the coronavirus pandemic with citywide lockdowns and en masse social distancing, numerous businesses have closed, and millions of Americans are out of work. We’re in the midst of an economic crisis as well as a health crisis. One response, as companies work to figure out what path to take, is CEOs cutting their own pay to help protect companies from layoffs or closure.
From the airline industry to hotels to gyms, CEOs have announced that they are taking partial or full pay cuts. Delta CEO Ed Bastain said in a company-wide memo that he has cut his own salary “by 100% through the next six months,” and that the members of the board of directors have elected to forgo compensation over that time period as well. Others in the airline industry have announced similar declarations, including Alaska Air, United, and Allegiant.
Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson said in a message to associates that he is giving up his salary for the remainder of the year, and cutting the pay of senior management in half. Also suffering from lost hotel revenue, Hyatt announced that its CEO, Mark Hoplamazian, and board chairman Tom Pritzker are forgoing their salaries through May. Lyft cofounders John Zimmer and Logan Green said they would donate their salaries to their company’s efforts to support drivers during this crisis, and Bahram Akradi, CEO of Life Time, which has 152 health clubs across North America, along with the company’s leadership team, have taken an indefinite pay freeze.
The Coca-Cola Company
The stock market has been pummeled and the second-quarter balance sheets will be ugly. But Coca-Cola CEO and Chairman James Quincey says he's nowhere near ready to panic. "We’ve got crisis adjustment in our DNA," said Quincey on Tuesday during CNBC's Squawk on the Street program.
Quincey said he remains optimistic about The Coca-Cola Co.'s long-term health and its increasingly diversified beverage portfolio, while acknowledging the company has not been immune to the widespread economic pain created by the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Quincey called the supply chain around the world "creaky" and said there are "flash points when it’s getting a little harder to get ingredients through, whether it’s delays at the borders, the big changes in channel mix." However, Quincey added the Atlanta-based beverage giant started the pandemic in a "robust position" and has a clear approach to getting through the "darkest hour" of fighting the virus.
Wall Street Journal
For those fortunate enough to work from home, it’s now a moral responsibility to not leave the house, so we can slow the spread of the new coronavirus. We’ve become our own IT pros, trying to troubleshoot the same problem: figuring out how the heck to video chat.
While social distancing, we can’t walk up to a colleague’s desk, go out with friends, attend an exercise class, or take the kids to school. Instead, we log on to Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp or Hangouts—and turn in-person events into pixels on a screen.
Like many of you, I’ve also been socializing virtually. Since San Francisco ordered its residents to shelter in place last week, I’ve participated in a virtual lunch, coffee, dinner or drink nearly every day. My inbox is full of Doodle polls and Calendly requests to schedule meeting times.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
As Social Distancing Enters our Lexicon, Office Use Trends Are Set To Pivot
Much ink is being spilled about how our world will change. Here’s one more data point for you: the densification movement in corporate office space is officially over.
We are working with clients who have employee populations that cannot work from home. Think about folks that handle calls that require sophisticated technology, privacy and monitoring such as financial services. Of course, those people need to be in an environment where they can perform their duties in a safe manner.
Here are two trends emerging right now:
De-densification of office space
Companies with on premise requirements for employees are looking for new space that is ready to go right now. They will move to spread people out in their existing portfolio and when they secure that new space they will quickly move employees to the new location.
Finding the new space is tougher than it sounds because inspecting locations is hard (though virtual tours are happening at an astonishing pace), and also because it could take months to get fiber and technology ready because no one is at work.
If offices are coming back in vogue, and I predict they will, then I want a private bathroom and a big bar. You can come by anytime, but stay six feet away with your drink in hand, please.
A and B workforces
In order to keep workers healthy, some real estate directors are working with HR to divide large groups of people doing the same kind of work into two different physical locations. This pattern of A & B workforces helps solve for quarantine requirements if someone becomes infected and has exposed other workers.
It will be interesting to watch how office space design is changing, yet again. But you can rest assured that the office furniture industry, architects and others supporting this sector are spinning up new approaches as I write this.
Turns out that “benching” is a very dense environment is so 2020. We are on to the next thing and it involves a lot more office space.
Note: These are my personal views and in no way represent the views of Cushman & Wakefield
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.
TommL/Getty Images
It’s the end of the workday, and your to-do list has barely been touched. You feel guilty for not getting more done. But this emotion is neither useful, nor healthy.
So, what can you do about it? How should you handle feelings that you’re letting down your coworkers, boss, customers — and even yourself? How can you learn to accept that you are doing the best you can? And, what are some strategies for getting smarter about how you tackle your interminable to-do list?
Your end-of-workday shame for not having accomplished what you set out to is often the result of unrealistic expectations, says Heidi Grant, the director of research and development for Americas Learning at EY and the author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It, among others. “Most humans are overly optimistic—we enter the day with an expectation and plan of getting all sorts of things done,” she says. But the trouble is, “we are not grounding our expectations in the reality of the work that we do.” So invariably when 6 o’clock rolls around, we feel anxious and guilt-ridden says Whitney Johnson, the executive coach and author most recently of Disrupt Yourself. “You look at what you didn’t get done, and you get that sinking feeling deep in your soul that you are not enough.” But, she says, “you mustn’t feel like a failure.”
As coronavirus outbreaks emerge in more places, investors seem to be turning to U.S. real estate as a good place to park their money.
So far, the uptick in interest has been strongest in single-family residential rental properties, with investors worldwide flocking to the sector.
Roofstock, a company that lists single-family rental houses for sale, says that it has seen traffic from Asia spike by 500% in recent weeks, CNBC reports. Other recent jumps in interest have been from Germany, the UK and Australia.
The key is that Roofstock can sell a rental property entirely online. While investors, especially from China, can't visit the United States for the moment to look at residential properties, they can complete deals remotely through sites like Roofstock.
Before getting into Opportunity Zones, Patrick McKenna, managing partner at Catalyst Opportunity Funds, had the venture fund focused on investing in entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley—from Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Milwaukee.
“The idea here is that there’s talent everywhere,” he says. “It’s under-capitalized. So, I’ve personally been in those places working with entrepreneurs and working with local investors.”
That experience helped McKenna develop an eye for cities with great potential. “I have a track record of being able to validate that there’s underlying growth, there’s talent and there’s a bright future in these places, but they are also under-capitalized,” he says.
Jimmy Simpson
When you first get a job that pays more than you’re used to, the feeling that you shouldn’t blow through all of your money is not only strong, but it’s also wise. Financial experts warn against lifestyle inflation, which is when you spend more money because you earn more money. Maybe you buy a new car or move into a more expensive house, and suddenly your expenses relative to your income are just as high as they were when you made less money. This is how people who earn a higher salary can still feel as if they’re not that well off.
But there’s another, more visceral reason you might have financial impostor syndrome: If you’ve spent most of your career not earning much, then it’s more familiar to you than being financially stable. Making enough money doesn’t feel real yet, and you’re afraid it will all go away.
In some cases, this can be a good thing. Pouring your extra money into paying off debt or building up your savings are all good habits to have. But it can also prevent you from taking care of yourself, even now that you can afford to.
Wren McDonald
Recognize any of these people? The colleague who doesn’t reply to emails in a timely fashion. The office-mate whose cellphone constantly chirps as texts pour in. The remote worker whose paper rustling disrupts every conference call.
When it comes to our colleagues and technology, we all have our individual pet peeves. But one thing everybody can probably agree on: Our frustrations with workplace technology often aren’t because the technology is intrinsically annoying. They’re because people are intrinsically annoying. And as technology expands into every available corner and crevice of the workplace, so does our co-workers’ ability to use that technology in ways that bug us.
While all these things may be mildly (or not so mildly) annoying on their own, they add up to something much bigger. For one thing, they make work a lot less pleasurable and a lot more stressful. But perhaps more significant, they make us less effective at our jobs. They create tension in the workplace and reduce collaboration. They interrupt our workflow and intrude on our attention. In fact, if workplace technology has largely failed to deliver on its promise of productivity gains, the gaps and conflicts in how we each use tech at work may be a major contributor to that disappointment.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
Folks, its a weird time in our world. There’s a lot of fear and misinformation out there. I assembled some of the latest thinking on COVID 19 for your review. Remain calm and remember your leadership matters. People in your organization and friends in your networking are watching how you act/react. Be safe; we will get through this….
We may be in a public health emergency with the coronavirus (covid-19), but that doesn't mean we lack the resources, or the common sense, to deal with it.
I've spent a good deal of time in my career, first on Wall Street and then in financial media, advising CEOs on issues including investing, health care, technology and more. And maybe it's the adviser in me, or the fact that I now run a youth wellness nonprofit serving millions of young people, or the fact that I'm a mother of four, or perhaps all of the above.
But my reaction thus far has been to retreat to the management (and family) basics: steady hand and safety first. Here's what I've been reminding my team: DON'T BE A HERO!
One of the first thing I notice in CEOs when they're up against a tough challenge -- a "black swan" event, as we call it on Wall Street, something unexpected that comes at you out of the blue -- is that he or she will surround themselves with the experts.
2. Don’t Jump to Conclusions When America’s Coronavirus Iceberg Emerges
MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Nobody should be surprised if there is a surge in the number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus within the U.S. in the weeks ahead. And nobody should confuse that surge with how rapidly the virus is spreading.
There is a risk that the coronavirus data will be misinterpreted in exactly that way by many investors and Americans at large alike. As a result, they may respond in ways that only intensify some of the problems stemming from the epidemic.
As of Monday, there were 605 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. That compares with 101 a week earlier. It is an increase driven not by a jump in the number of people infected with the coronavirus but rather the number of people infected with the virus who have been found. So far they are mostly people who had a known contact with somebody who had already fallen ill, such as residents and staff in the nursing-care facility in Washington state that has been tied to several deaths.
Nations are closing borders, stocks are plummeting and a New York Times headline reads: “The Coronavirus Has Put the World’s Economy in Survival Mode.” Both political parties have realized the crisis could severely impact the November elections — House, Senate, presidency. And sacré bleu, they’ve even shuttered the Louvre!
Some of these reactions are understandable, much of it pure hysteria. Meanwhile, the spread of the virus continues to slow.
More than 18,000 Americans have died from this season’s generic flu so far, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2018, the CDC estimated, there were 80,000 flu deaths. That’s against 19 coronavirus deaths so far, from about 470 cases.
The number of coronavirus cases around the world has soared past 113,000, with more than 4,000 deaths.
Even the man who oversees New York City's major airports and bus terminals has tested positive -- leaving many wondering how rampant the virus will get.
CNN readers have been asking sharp questions about coronavirus every day. And each weekday, we'll select some of the top questions and get you the answers.
Here are some of the most recent popular questions.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Right now, more than 109,000 people around the world have contracted the novel coronavirus, and more than 3,800 have died. Meanwhile, much of the world is waiting anxiously, wondering how bad the pandemic threat will get and whether it will affect those they love.
It’s easy to feel powerless in a time like this — there’s not yet a vaccine or drug for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. And Americans are watching their government scramble to implement measures to keep them safe — something it may not be entirely prepared to do.
But while individuals may not be able to halt the spread of coronavirus, there are some steps we can take to help protect the most vulnerable — and to combat some of the social ills exacerbated by the virus, like racism and age discrimination.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
ababil12/Getty Images
The Covid-19 crisis has now reached a new critical phase where public health systems need to act decisively to contain the growth in new epicenters outside China.
Clearly, the main emphasis is and should be on containing and mitigating the disease itself. But the economic impacts are also significant, and many companies are feeling their way towards understanding, reacting to, and learning lessons from rapidly unfolding events. Unanticipated twists and turns will be revealed with each news cycle, and we will only have a complete picture in retrospect.
Nevertheless, given the very different degrees of preparedness across companies, the further potential for disruption, and the value of being better prepared for future crises, it’s worth trying to extract what we have learned so far. Based on our ongoing analysis and support for our clients around the world, we have distilled the following 12 lessons for responding to unfolding events, communicating, and extracting and applying learnings.
Courtesy of HKS
The open office concept, once the darling of cutting-edge tenants, comes in for a lot of criticism these days. Major media outlets fill pages with horror stories about workers who lose productivity in the more social environment or who can’t hear phone conversations due to the background drone of colleagues, with some saying they can’t hear themselves think or have the private talks sometimes necessary in an office.
“We hear a lot about how the open office is terrible for introverts, and how it’s ruining everybody’s life,” HKS Architects Director of Commercial Interiors Kate Davis said.
But the open office is not dead, and interior designers and architects like Davis have begun digging deep into the operations of their corporate clients, helping them move beyond the simple layouts that strand employees in seas of workstations.
“Companies do push back sometimes [against open-office concepts], and I think that’s short-sighted,” Eastlake Studio partner Christina Brown said. “I’ve been in places where the open office concept didn’t work, and it’s usually because it wasn’t thoughtfully done, and there was no buy-in from the workforce.”
Illustrations by Federica Bordoni
Is it reasonable to expect to enjoy your job? That’s a question many of us have wrestled with, often as we lie awake with anxious thoughts about our careers. A 2017 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 61% of respondents chose work as their top source of anxiety.
Steve Jobs famously once argued, “You’ve got to love what you do.” It’s one of those casual exhortations (most easily made by a billionaire) that can leave anyone feeling inadequate.
But work doesn’t have to be awful. We could bring back satisfaction to our work by alleviating some of the excess stresses of our professions. Here are nine interventions from the book, based on workplace research.
It is common for commercial tenants to conduct their initial lease negotiations through their brokers and the landlords’ leasing agents, resulting in a term sheet that provides a skeletal understanding of their deal. Except regarding very large leases, attorneys are rarely asked to participate in term sheet negotiations, and subsequently, they often are faced with incomplete or ambiguous term sheets that make it more difficult to draft and negotiate a lease agreement.
Tenants who don’t want to bring their lawyer into initial term sheet talks may still avoid or minimize these term sheet problems, reducing the likelihood of a cratered deal and eliminating costly attorney hours spent on filling in the gaps of an incomplete or ambiguous term sheet.
Most importantly, tenant representatives should have a clear understanding with the landlord’s leasing agent about the economic terms of a deal, as well as any particular provisions that may fundamentally alter the total costs associated with the lease. Failure to reach agreement on these terms can stall or markedly slow the pace of negotiations on a binding lease agreement.
Ezra Bailey/Getty Images
If you’ve ever doubted whether human beings are designed for walking, all you have to do is strap a fussy baby into a Babybjörn and go for a stroll. The crying stops. With each step, the kicking and the thrashing and the resistance fades away. Hours can pass and, if you’re moving, that previously anguished child becomes a dream.
But my purpose here isn’t to give you childcare advice. It’s to convince you of the power of simply taking a walk, which works on a racing or miserable mind just as well as a colicky baby. We are an ambulatory species, and often the best way to find stillness — in our hearts and in our heads — is to get moving.
For decades, the citizens of Copenhagen witnessed Søren Kierkegaard embody this very idea. The cantankerous philosopher would write in the morning at a standing desk, and then around noon, head out onto the busy streets of Denmark’s capital city. He walked on the newfangled “sidewalks” that had been built for fashionable citizens to stroll along. He walked through the city’s parks and through the pathways of Assistens Cemetery, where he would later be buried. On occasion, he walked out past the city’s walls and into the countryside. Kierkegaard never seemed to walk straight either — he zigged and zagged, crossing the street without notice, trying to always remain in the shade. When he had worn himself out, worked through what he was struggling with, or been struck with a good idea, he would turn around and head home, where he would write for the rest of the day.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Katherine Streeter
Younger employees now entering their prime working years are so far proving as loyal to employers as the generation before them, despite a hot job market.
In January 2018, 70% of workers between the ages of 22 and 37, commonly known as the millennial generation, had worked for their current employer for 13 months or more, according to an analysis of federal data by the Pew Research Center. By comparison, that number was 69% for workers who were in the same age group in 2002 and are known as Generation X.
“When you look at millennials, they have no shorter job tenures with their current employers than Generation X did back in 2002,” said Richard Fry, senior researcher at Pew. “Ten years after the great recession, it’s still the case.”
Even when looking at longer tenures, data suggest younger workers may be more loyal than their predecessors were as they were getting their careers under way. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in January 2018, 28.8% of workers ages 25 to 34 had worked for the same employer for at least five years. The share of workers in that age group with equal tenure in 2000 was 21.8%.
Olalekan Jeyifous
It’s never been easier for workers to collaborate—or so it seems. Open, flexible, activity-based spaces are displacing cubicles, making people more visible. Messaging is displacing phone calls, making people more accessible. Enterprise social media such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are displacing watercooler conversations, making people more connected. Virtual-meeting software such as Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Webex is displacing in-person meetings, making people ever-present. The architecture of collaboration has not changed so quickly since technological advances in lighting and ventilation made tall office buildings feasible, and one could argue that it has never before been so efficient. Designing workplaces for interaction between two or more individuals—or collaboration, from the Latin collaborare, meaning to work together—has never seemed so easy.
But as the physical and technological structures for omnichannel collaboration have spread, evidence suggests they are producing behaviors at odds with designers’ expectations and business managers’ desires. In a number of workplaces we have observed for research projects or consulting assignments, those structures have produced less interaction—or less meaningful interaction—not more.
In this article we discuss those unintended consequences and provide guidance on conducting experiments to uncover how your employees really interact. That will help you equip them with the spaces and technologies that best support their needs.
Abbey Lossing
It has been a tough decade for brick-and-mortar retailers, and matters seem only to be getting worse.
Despite a strong consumer economy, physical retailers closed more than 9,000 stores in 2019 — more than the total in 2018, which surpassed the record of 2017. Already this year, retailers have announced more than 1,200 more intended closings, including 125 Macy’s stores.
Some people call what has happened to the shopping landscape “the retail apocalypse.” It is easy to chalk it up to the rise of e-commerce, which has thrived while physical stores struggle. And there is no denying that Amazon and other online retailers have changed consumer behavior radically or that big retailers like Walmart and Target have tried to beef up their own online presence.
But this can be overstated.
Red Company
More developers are building waterborne structures. Floating buildings can alleviate housing shortages in major cities at a time when land is scarce and restrictive zoning makes it hard to build up, said Koen Olthuis, whose Netherlands-based architecture firm Waterstudio specializes in floating structures.
For flood-prone cities like Miami, structures that rise and sink with the sea offer an alternative to waterfront construction that looks increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels. “Climate change has definitely helped us spread our designs and ideas,” Mr. Olthuis said.
So far, most of these structures are little more than elaborate houseboats. But some firms are working on multistory office, hotel and apartment buildings that could extend congested cities into the ocean.
Pinewood Forest
Looking for an environmentally friendly community where you don’t have to drive everywhere? This new community might just be the answer for you. (And it is next to a large movie studio if show biz is your dream.)
The exciting New Urbanist community in Fayetteville, Georgia, meets these criteria. Pinewood Forest is just 23 miles south of downtown Atlanta and is an environmentally friendly community with many of the amenities people would now like to have in just walking distance.
Residents of this community are actors and stunt doubles, as well as doctors, teachers and business people.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Maren Caruso/Getty Images
The average professional spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. For the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent and 120 messages received per day.
Most professionals have resorted to one of two extreme coping mechanisms as a last-ditch attempt to survive the unending onslaught: at one end, there are the inbox-zero devotees who compulsively keep their inboxes clear, and, at the other, there are those who have essentially given up. Emails enter their inbox and remain.
In the face of these two extremes, some have advocated for a more moderate approach: simply, check email less often.
NBBJ
In a Seattle suburb, retailer Recreational Equipment Inc. is building a new headquarters that is blurring the boundaries between office and nature.
Once it opens in the summer, workers will be able to walk from one room to the next through outdoor staircases and bridges. They can hold group meetings on rooftop terraces, or around a fire pit in a courtyard full of native plants. Skylights and oversize sliding doors will bring in sunshine and air.
“You can’t really be in the building anywhere without having a visual connection to the outdoors,” said Mindy Levine-Archer, a partner at architecture firm NBBJ, which designed the project.
REI is one of a growing number of companies building unique headquarters meant to attract employees and market their brand. In 2017, Apple opened a massive, donut-shaped office in Cupertino, Calif., whose futuristic design earned it the nickname spaceship. Consumer-goods company Unilever PLC renovated its U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., to re-create the feeling of a New York City loft and appeal to younger workers.
Innovo Property Group/Square Mile Capital Management
The vacant lots that dot the dense cores of American cities might seem unloved, but they have a set of secret admirers.
In their race to build ever closer to urban consumers, industrial developers want to snap up these properties and turn them into distribution and logistics hubs so they can provide cheap and speedy delivery to the urban masses. However, finding a viable infill site can be a struggle. Even if an industrial developer identifies a property, it can still face stiff competition from developers from other asset classes, as well as myriad financial and logistical hurdles.
But with industrial land scarcer than it has ever been, the opportunity to build on these underdeveloped lots is attractive enough to inspire developers to face down immense challenges.
It is commonly thought to be a terrible time for many brick-and-mortar retailers, but one segment seems to be bucking the trend – auto parts.
One business, in particular, seems to be doing especially well: AutoZone. Its stock skyrocketed to nearly $1200 a share at the end of 2019.
Investors see AutoZone as a leader in a segment of retail relatively well protected from the e-commerce incursions that have brought down so many other once seemingly invincible stores.
Tishman Speyer
Commercial property giant Tishman Speyer has started offering its suite of health, wellness and safety services, which it calls Zo, to construction workers at the company's new developments.
Previously, Zo was available to Tishman Speyer office tenant workers.
The move comes as developers struggle to find and retain skilled construction workers for their projects. About 61% of construction companies say they are experiencing a high level of difficulty in finding skilled workers, according to the USG Corp.-U.S. Chamber of Commerce Commercial Construction Index for Q3 2019, which surveyed more than 200 contractors.
"The severity of the skilled worker shortage shows no signs of abating," the report said. Tishman Speyer will first offer Zo to construction workers at its 2.8M SF 66 Hudson Blvd. development in Manhattan, called The Spiral, in partnership with Turner Construction. The company estimates that there will be as many as 10,000 trade workers on-site over the life of the project, which will be completed in 2022. The company asserts that it is the first commercial property developer to offer office-tenant amenities to construction workers.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
White Packert/Getty Images
Imagine the feeling: after months of courting a new client, who has given every indication that a lucrative contract award is imminent, you receive an email from their procurement team. The letter states that there will be a competitive bidding process; that all bidders must agree up-front to standard (onerous) terms and conditions, and that any attempt to speak directly with the client will result in expulsion from the process.
This unsettling scenario is increasingly familiar to many sellers – and most assume that negotiating is more or less futile. Their choice, as they see it, is either to walk away, or capitulate to procurement’s game rules, thus losing the opportunity for potentially significant value creation (and future profit). They are about to enter a predicament we call “winning the pitch but losing the negotiation.”
Over the last several decades, we have coached and trained both buyers and sellers through many similar situations. We have seen buyers waste time and money by structuring pitches in ways that destroy value – and sellers lose time, money, and emotional balance by navigating those processes naively.
Shutterstock/The Atlantic
When Danielle Eskinazi’s 4-year-old son gets his own small cart to push at the grocery store, he carries himself differently. “His back straightens up a little bit,” she told me. “He looks around like a peacock to make sure everybody's watching [and can see that] he has a bit of independence in what he chooses to eat.”
Or at least the illusion of independence. As he tools around the store, he’ll often add copious amounts of junk food—chocolate, mostly—to his cart that Eskinazi, a casting director living in Santa Clarita, California, will frequently veto before the end of the shopping trip.
That doesn’t stop him, and countless other children, from wanting to steer shopping carts tailored to their small frame. These mini carts, a fixture in many grocery stores in the United States and abroad, are widely adored by children and generally useful to retailers’ business strategies, even if they are also occasionally irritating to the shoppers who must dodge them in the aisles.
According to Sheila Williams Ridge, who teaches early-childhood education at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, kids relish the sense of ownership that comes with pushing their own cart. “Children get to do real work and they love that,” she wrote to me in an email. “They get to drive the cart independently because the grown-ups have their own. That feeling of autonomy is important for young children.”
HBR Staff/Jorg Greuel/Getty Images
Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships. And we now spend more time than ever on our phones, with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.
But dig a little deeper, and a more nuanced picture emerges about social media users today that has important implications for the ways in which brands reach customers. Specifically, when you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people.
For example, 2019 findings from Edison Research and Triton Digital show social media usage overall among Americans 12 to 34 years old across several platforms has either leveled off or is waning, while 2019 research from Global Web Index suggests that the amount of time millennial and Gen Z audiences spend on many social platforms is either flat, declining, or not rising as greatly as it has in years’ past.
Blackstone is all-in on industrial, viewing the favored asset class that has seen vacancies at record-lows thanks to e-commerce as poised for even greater growth as more and more investors seek to gobble up warehouses closer to dense city centers.
And aside from betting on the tried and true industrial asset class, the alternative asset manager is tooting its horn about venturing off the beaten path as it continues to tap into the retail market more broadly through its non-traded REIT the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, according to Stephen Schwarzman, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone at Goodwin’s Real Estate Capital Markets Conference 2020.
Blackstone started buying warehouse logistics in 2010, betting it was a good investment as e-commerce behemoth Amazon began to increase its market share, predicting that other retailers would follow suit, thus leading Blackstone to sell-off its shopping malls and acquire an estimated one billion square feet of warehouses across the world to date. “Once you understood what was happening with online shopping and that every retailer in scale would need to do something similar [to Amazon], the whole game was gonna change,” Schwarzman said.
Alexander/Getty Images
The U.S. jobs market grew at a better-than-expected rate in January, thanks to unseasonably warm weather, beating Wall Street forecasts and suggesting that the labor market can continue to fuel economic growth in 2020, the latest monthly report from the Labor Department shows.
January saw a pickup in hiring, as 225,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy last month—better than the 158,o00 jobs expected by economists, according to Dow Jones. That’s an uptick from the 145,000 jobs added in December: The labor market in January benefited from warmer-than-usual weather, which encouraged more hiring than expected in construction and other industries.
The unemployment rate, however, climbed to from 3.5% to 3.6%, no longer holding steady at its lowest level since 1969, according to CNBC.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
HBR Staff/Bulgac/Getty Images
Corporate boards are under increasing pressure to diversify their ranks – adding more women and minorities, as well as executives with different cultural and functional backgrounds – to better represent the people their organizations employ and serve. At the same time, the bar for “board readiness” has never been higher: directors are scrutinized for their ability to understand more complex businesses, demonstrate technical know-how, deliver effective governance, and generate sustainable long-term performance.
What can leaders aspiring to board roles do to prepare and position themselves for success? How does one develop what we call boardroom capital?
Unfortunately, the capabilities that power C-suite careers are not the same as those needed to sit around the top table, specifically in a non-executive capacity, because you no longer have all the levers of operating power at your fingertips. That is perhaps bad (but not terrible) news for obvious board candidates: they’ll simply have to work to develop the right skills. It’s unquestionably good news for non-obvious candidates – that is, those who didn’t or couldn’t ascend to the ranks of top management, which continue to be male- and majority-race dominated around the world. They will need to work hard, too, but they can start on a more level playing field.
Business activity in the U.S. improved in early 2020, contrasting with weaker economic performance in some of the world’s other major economies.
Data company IHS Markit said Friday that its composite purchasing managers index for the U.S., a measure of activity in businesses, posted a 10-month high of 53.1 in January, up from 52.7 in December. A level above 50 points to growth in business activity, while a reading below that mark points to contraction.
IHS Markit said the pickup was due to growth in the services sector. Manufacturing PMI dipped to 51.7 in January, from 52.4 a month earlier.
The data “highlight a manufacturing sector that is not out of the woods yet, with goods producers seeing only modest gains in output and new orders,” said IHS Markit economist Sian Jones.
Getty Images
Recently, I counted myself among thousands of Lenovo employees at our offices in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, who transitioned from a traditional workspace to an agile environment. Our team, the global communications team, moved as part of the final teams to the new space.
This new way of working, commonly called “agile,” parallels changes in business climates, as conditions become more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. I’ve found agile is defined differently by each company. For us, it means no assigned workspaces — rows of desks that raise and lower and are equipped with a monitor. Employees operate out of neighborhoods, grouped by job function. There are common spaces for informal meetings, team rooms and private telephone booths for calls.
As we have adapted to the physical dimensions of our building, we have learned some lessons along the way on how to better navigate the dynamic workspace. Here are our top 10.
Ellen Weinstein
The therapist will see you now—in your office.
Companies from Dell Technologies Inc. DELL -1.97% to Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL -2.42% are bringing mental-health professionals into the workplace to offer on-site counseling for employees. One-third of large employers—those with 5,000 or more employees—plan to offer on-site behavioral-health counseling this year, up from a quarter of those companies in 2019 and less than one-fifth in 2018, according to a survey from the Business Group on Health.
Companies say the benefit can be a tool for improving employee performance and, ultimately retention. Employees want mental-health care but often struggle to find the help they need that fits their schedule or is included in their insurance coverage, say executives at several companies. In-house counseling can save time and money and boost workers’ resilience and productivity, as well as their overall health and well-being, say health-care experts and human-resources executives.
The final quarter of the final year of the last decade proved to be positive for the U.S. office market, according to three reports from commercial real estate firms Cushman & Wakefield, JLL and Newmark Knight Frank.
Cushman & Wakefield analysts commented that “job gains boosted demand for office space, keeping absorption levels consistent with that of the past three years, despite uncertainty surrounding tariffs and trade issues.” The report added that financial services, professional services and information employment increases helped lead to “healthy positive absorption,” while “healthy demand for office space in the fourth quarter of 2019 was matched by rising supply.”
When it came to supply, the JLL analysts pointed out that the market, overall, is “entering the final stages of the development cycle,” which means it will pull back “after the 51 million square feet that will deliver in 2020.” NKF sounded a note of caution about the pipeline, however, pointing out that “the amount of space under construction remains robust, and warrants close monitoring in the year ahead.”
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.
Pictometry
Billionaire brothers Charles Koch and the late David Koch became known for their financial support of conservative and arts causes. But they, and their two brothers, Bill and Frederick, quietly built another legacy: hundreds of millions of dollars worth of high-end real estate.
The four brothers have amassed some of the world’s most spectacular private homes, including a large waterfront compound on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod once owned by Bunny Mellon, sprawling Palm Beach estates, a replica of an old Western town in Colorado and an Austrian castle once owned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The estates are a far cry from the roughly 160-acre property on the outskirts of Wichita, Kan., where the brothers grew up. They spent their summers in bunkhouses while working on cattle ranches owned by their father.
FCP
Investor demand for cool office buildings in Atlanta remains high in the new year, with the latest buy coming from a New York firm that snapped up a collection of historic warehouses that have been converted to workspace desired by tech and creative firms.
Clarion Partners of New York paid $69.7 million for Stockyards, a mixed-use development on Brady Avenue in midtown Atlanta's upper westside neighborhood. The seller was a partnership between real estate investment firm FCP of Bethesda, Maryland, and Westbridge Partners, the development firm that spearheaded the project.
Westbridge, co-founded by Chris Faussemagne, converted the former stockyard and meatpacking plant built in the early 1900s into 142,478 square feet of creative office and entertainment space about three years ago. In June 2018, Faussemagne merged Westbridge into Third & Urban, an Atlanta investment and development firm that focuses on adaptive reuse and urban infill projects across the Southeast and Texas.
HBR Staff/Rawin Tanpin/EyeEm/Getty Images
Last fall, in Northern California, the United States experienced its first-ever long-lasting and deliberate, large-scale blackout. Fueled by increased fears of devastating fires due to its century-old equipment, the region’s utility companies shut off power to more than 1.5 million people forcing many evacuations. The impact was devastating; Michael Wara, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University, estimated the cost to California as up to $2.5 billion. For cybersecurity experts like myself, the blackout was a signal of just how precarious our reliance on electricity is, and how much we have to fear in cyberattacks.
Think about what would happen if a cyberattack brought down the power grid in New York or even just a larger part of the country. As we saw in California, people could manage for a few hours — maybe a few days — but what would happen if the outage lasted for a week or more? If a utility in a high-density population area was targeted with a cyberattack, is an evacuation of millions of people feasible or desirable?
Questions we should all be asking include: What do we do if the power grid is breached making electric-start backup generators unusable? What’s the backup plan for the backup plan? What happens to our food supply? Our water supply? Our sewer systems? Our financial systems? Our economy? Answering these questions requires systems-level thinking about how everything is connected and consideration of the interdependencies. For example, hospitals might have backup generators. But, what about the supply line for refueling? If the refueling stations need electricity to operate pumps, what is the plan?
Steve Brown
Homebuilders are headed into 2020 in the best mood in years.
Low interest rates and good economy are driving more buyers to their doors, and worries about a possible recession have subsided.
“What a great time to be in our industry,” said Sheryl Palmer, CEO of Arizona-based Taylor Morrison Homes, a major builder in North Texas. “Each year we think we only have another year or two because a recession is looming.
“I just don’t see that,” Palmer said. “We are going to have some bumps. But I think we have a long road ahead.”
Just finishing the housing industry’s best year since the Great Recession, builders have some reason to be more upbeat.
Amazon has transformed online shopping by making the delivery process fast, cheap and relatively painless for consumers.
One major way Amazon has been able to achieve this goal is by building out a sprawling network of warehouses around the country. These facilities are typically at least 100,000 square feet in size and house all kinds of product inventory.
Amazon launched its warehouse network in 1997 with two fulfillment centers in Seattle, Washington and New Castle, Delaware. The company began adding new locations at a rapid pace in 2005, according to MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Michael Blann/Getty Images
So much of the business culture remains fixated on strategic disruption, digital transformation, and the meteoric rise (and disastrous fall) of venture-backed unicorns. What if we took just a moment to think a little smaller, to act a lot more humbly, to elevate the person-to-person interactions that lead to more meaningful relationships?
Sure, successful companies and leaders think differently from everyone else. But they also care more than everyone else—about customers, about colleagues, about how the whole organization conducts itself when there are so many opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values.
In a world being utterly reshaped (and often disfigured) by technology, people are hungrier than ever for a deeper and more authentic sense of humanity.
TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD/FORBES
The Santa Rosa-based company was founded by tech executive Nikki Pechet and venture capital investor Jack Abraham, both of whom were impacted by the fires. Seeing opportunity in the ashes, they set out to reinvent home building with software designed to cut the delays and cost overruns that plague the industry.
Homebound takes a fee based on the cost of the project, but won’t say how much. (General contractors tend to charge in the range of 10% to 25% to manage construction.) First year revenue was an estimated $10 million.
“As we watched people try to navigate the process and the complexity of everything they had to do to build a home, we knew there were really simple technology tools that were used in other industries that could make the process simpler,” says Pechet, who serves as Homebound’s CEO.
Her software tracks 379 unique tasks that are common when building a home, allowing customers to track the progress as they would a Seamless food delivery or a ride with Uber. It was essential for Hicks, a former Hewlett-Packard IT manager. He could, for instance, ask questions about the color of bathroom tiles with messages that would be sent to a team of interior designers on staff and send information about any changes made to the rest of the team. The app would also notify subcontractors when and where the tiles were delivered.
ClarkandCompany/Getty Images
An ability to override short-term impulses that conflict with long-term goals is a hallmark of successful people. Research has shown that people with strong self-control have better health, relationships, finances, and careers. They are also less likely to have problems with overeating, overspending, smoking, alcohol or drug abuse, procrastination, and unethical behavior. Overcoming temptation also seems to be intrinsically rewarding — people with high self-control are also more satisfied with their lives and experience their lives as more meaningful.
But is resisting temptation always beneficial? A small but growing body of research has begun to illuminate a dark side of self-control, with important implications for organizational life.
Self-control can restrict emotional experiences. One of the reasons why people high in self-control resist temptations is that they experience less tempting desires. But this might also mean that these people have less intense emotional experiences; that is, they respond to situations in more neutral ways. For example, high self-control might prevent employees from fully enjoying positive career outcomes, such as promotions, raises, and outstanding performance appraisals.
There is no such thing as a simple commercial real estate transaction. With dozens of stakeholders, layers of financing, regulatory concerns, and complicated, speculative valuation methods closing a transaction is inherently complex and time consuming.
Thankfully, technology has already started to help. Tools have emerged that eliminate the recurring manual entry of data, improve underwriting through analysis consolidation and permit the direct integration of systems across several key stakeholders.
Such developments have greatly expedited daily tasks like information collection, valuations and deal submission processes.
Shutterstock
Real estate companies are embracing technology across a range of areas. But these efforts are mainly in the customer-facing arena, such as providing better services to multifamily or office tenants.
But, save for the occasional exception, few companies are able to use tech to make investment decisions for various reasons, such as lack of experience and in some cases a lack of relevant technology.
One investor, though, has figured out a way to use established tech to provide insight into their purchasing decisions. That is Clarion Partners. Its managing director and head of acquisitions, Brian Watkins, recently spoke at a Transwestern Capital Market Symposium for institutional investors and described what the firm is doing.
For the past year to 18 months, he says, the company has been working with a third party provider to apply cell phone data to retail investing, taking advantage of geofencing—namely, to map around the end of a center or a store and understand what customers’ patterns are, where they’re living and where their cell phone ultimately sleeps at night. It can even glean data to help the company understand travel patterns and where people are moving, he says.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Mario Tama/Getty Image
The tech circus known as CES is a time to reflect on all that you didn’t get during the holidays.
An air-conditioned baseball cap? A TV that rotates vertically for smartphone video? A single, reusable box for all of your Amazon purchases? These are the first answers to tomorrow's questions, large and small.
What you’re about to see isn’t an endorsement—lots of inventions don’t actually end up for sale—but it is an exclamation: “Somebody actually made this!”
Konrad Putzier and Kevin Hand
“We spend so much time working,” says Mr. Dewane, a former professor and architect at workspace-design giant Gensler, and now a director at the architecture firm Barker/Nestor. “It just should feel better.”
Rethinking how a space is structured could change the ways people do their jobs, Mr. Dewane says. His solution, one beginning to gain traction across the U.S., is a concept he calls a “eudaimonia machine,” its name based on the Greek term for human flourishing. In it, workers move through five or six distinct zones during the day. Each space has a purpose, from socializing to research, allowing people to alternate between focused work and chances to recharge. The design culminates in individual “deep-work chambers,” intended for focus.
The concept is, in many ways, a repudiation of open-office design as well as a departure from the look of modern offices, including spaces created by Mr. Dewane’s former employer, Gensler. One of the best-known and closely followed workplace design firms, Gensler is behind open plans at companies ranging from Facebook Inc. to Reebok.
Since the recession, the average amount of square feet devoted to U.S. office workers has declined, according to research from Cushman & Wakefield, the brokerage and real-estate services company. Many employers favor open floor plans because they allow companies to tightly pack workers and save on real-estate costs, even as some staffers regularly bristle that the spaces hurt their productivity.
James Porter/Getty Images
Unfortunately, it did start to impact me, from the internal cringe and visible wince when my name was mispronounced, to wondering if my contributions were valued at all if people couldn’t take a moment to correctly learn my name. Worst of all, I agonized over how to correct the situation when someone introduced me to a third party with the wrong pronunciation, and soon, an entire team of people were saying my name incorrectly.
Not enough research has been done on the effect of having your name mispronounced at work, but there’s a growing body on how teachers mispronouncing names negatively impacts students. A 2012 study titled “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classrooms” found that when students of color had their names mispronounced in the classroom, it affected their social emotional well-being and by extension, harmed their ability to learn. The study also concluded that mispronouncing the names of students of color constituted a racial microaggression because it created shame and disassociation from their culture.
We know having a non-white name can negatively impact your chances of getting a job in Western countries. One study found that resumes with white-sounding names were 28% more likely to get a callback for a job interview. In France, resumes with North African-sounding names were less likely to receive interview opportunities.
In an effort to normalize non-Anglo Saxon names in our workplaces — and by extension, to create work cultures where everyone feels included and welcome — I’ve created a short guide for both the pronouncer and the person whose name is mispronounced.
Jason Pofahl/Unsplash
About half of all baby boomers have hit the age of 65, and while exact retirement ages will vary, their sheer numbers — 693 million boomers worldwide will hit retirement ages in the next decade — compared to generations before will be felt by industries that cater to retirees.
Travel, leisure activity and hotel properties have soared in value since 2011, when the first boomers started turning 65, according to a new Cushman & Wakefield report shared with Bisnow.
Boomers control 70% of disposable income in the U.S., according to the report, titled Demographic Shifts: The World In 2030. Though a generation that has had its entire working life span to build wealth should be expected to have the lion’s share of such income, 70% is too high a number to be merely cyclical, C&W said. Millennials have so far not been able to keep up with their parents' savings patterns due to flat wages and the explosion of student debt.
Boomers are not just likely to control an outsized portion of disposable income over the next decade; they will likely spend a larger portion of that income as well, according to the C&W report. Boomers have spent more and saved less at every point in their lives than their parents did.
Granite Properties
While it’s easy for development wonks to drool over activity in crane-studded areas such as Midtown, major real estate projects abound across metro Atlanta right now.
This year, expect progress with colossal adaptive-reuse projects, skyline-altering new construction, and, in some cases, a hybrid of the two. The future promises an Atlanta that’s taller, denser, and, ideally, more vibrant.
Below are a few projects worth keeping on your radar as so much heavy machinery does its thing in 2020.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
James Yang
The new year is supposed to bring hope, but too often it feels grim. We resolve to be virtuous—to lose weight, to exercise, to unplug from social media—but we recall past failures and fear another losing struggle. We toast to a better, happier world in 2020, but we know there will be endless bad news and vitriol, especially this election year.
We could use a fresh approach. For 2020, here’s a resolution that could actually work: Go on a low-bad diet. Our minds and lives are skewed by a fundamental imbalance that is just now becoming clear to scientists: the negativity effect. Also known as the negativity bias, it’s the universal tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.
We’re devastated by a word of criticism but unmoved by a shower of praise. We see the hostile face in the crowd and miss all the friendly smiles. We focus so much on bad news, especially in a digital world that magnifies its power, that we don’t realize how much better life is becoming for people around the world.
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Don’t take too seriously any speculations about what the next decade will hold. Be ready for another wave of astounding, unforeseen events.
Who in 2000 could have foreseen 9/11 or the economic crisis of 2008? Or the election of our first African-American president? Who in 2010 could have predicted the rise of political populism and the ascension of Donald Trump, Brexit or the aggressive foreign policies of China and Russia? Or the general breakdown in recent years of the post-WWII order that led to the avoidance of another global conflict and created conditions for the stunning rise in global living standards? (Over 1 billion people have emerged from dire poverty in the new millennium; that’s 137,000 people a day.) Or that billions of people would possess handheld devices that are virtually supercomputers? Or that Hong Kong would be rocked by pro-democracy demonstrations for months on end, which could, in the goodness of time, have profound repercussions in China itself?
Nonetheless, despite the future’s impenetrable fog, the itch to predict is irresistible. So here goes, in a few categories.
One of the truisms of modern life is that nobody has any time. Everybody is busy, burned out, swamped, overwhelmed. So let’s try a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you came into possession of a magical new set of technologies that could automate or expedite every single part of your job.
What would you do with the extra time? Maybe you’d pick up a hobby, or have more children, or learn to luxuriate in the additional leisure. But what if I told you that you wouldn’t do any of those things: You would just work the exact same amount of time as before.
I can’t prove this, because I don’t know you. What I do know is that something remarkably similar to my hypothetical happened in the U.S. economy in the 20th century—not in factories, or in modern offices. But inside American homes.
Zach Gross/New York Times
Richard F. Shepard, as keen and joyful a chronicler of New York as ever graced the pages of The Times, had simple advice for anyone out and about on the city streets. Look up, he said. Look especially at second-floor windows above storefronts. That, he liked to say, is where a lot of absorbing action takes place. Why would a perambulating soul wish to miss any of it?
One can imagine Mr. Shepard shaking his head at many of today’s New Yorkers. He died in 1998, so he never held an iPhone or, I’m willing to bet, any of its forerunners. But there’s little question that he would have found something hollow about this smartphone age, when so many people routinely violate the Shepard rule, New Yorkers being no exception. At any given moment, thousands of them are so focused on their little screens that they fail to look up. Truly, they don’t know what they’re missing.
Plenty has been written about the perils of modern electronic devices, real or feared: They’re rewiring brains. They’re shortening attention spans. They’re killing dinner-table conversation. They’re disrupting sleep patterns. They’re addictive. A somewhat ungainly word came into being a decade ago: nomophobia — short for no mobile phone phobia — meaning a fear of being without one’s phone, or at least without juice or network coverage.
So here is 2019 in its last moments: The actress Sharon Stone gets kicked off a dating app for being herself, while the ever-screechy President Trump gets to stay on Twitter after retweeting fake accounts and links that appear to unmask a whistle-blower.
This is the state of the internet as the decade comes to a close. Confusion reigns, for good reason, about the many tech inventions that have been heaped upon us over the past 10 years. Few of us can even guess at what the next great innovation will be because the industry has stayed in neutral for too long. Meanwhile, tech I.P.O.s in 2019 were less than stellar (see Uber), bad economics were unmasked (see WeWork), and trust in tech eroded (see Facebook), even as the big got even bigger (also see Facebook).
It all feels very Yeats-y — things falling apart, the center not holding, anarchy loosed, drowned innocence, a lack of conviction from the best and, of course, endless loudmouthery from the worst.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Wikimedia Commons/Estial
Could cap rates go below 2% for the best assets in big cities? Could some retail assets start to outperform their stellar industrial counterparts? Will climate change continue to rise in importance for investors? Each December the strategy and research team at UBS Asset Management outlines what it thinks will be the key questions the global real estate industry will need to address in the coming year.
At a point of big change for the sector, the future of real estate, how to allocate capital in an expensive market, what to do with a problem like retail and addressing the climate crisis feature prominently.
Here are the issues to get your head around next year if you want to succeed in real estate.
Many malls across the country are struggling, but there are possible fixes in some situations. A solution used to revitalize the West Oaks Mall in Orlando could be a model for other shopping centers.
In Orlando, the Sunpass Customer Service Center, which is operated by Xerox, leased 75,000 square feet space in a former Sears. A Bed, Bath and Beyond call center occupies another 40,000 square feet, which used to be leased by a Belk.
David Chapin, EVP at JLL, thinks more office tenants will look towards malls as a high-density office space option for a low cost. To him, the mall is a perfect home for call centers and back office functions, especially with recent trends in open office floor plans and cafe style conference rooms.
As cities are growing and the labor market is changing, so is the office demand.
Unsplash/Carl Newton
As cities and commercial developers advocate nationally for reductions in urban parking requirements to prep for a less car-centric future, financiers and tenants continue to desire an abundance of parking spaces even if they come at a steep cost.
Parking is expensive to build, and increasingly developers don’t consider it a worthwhile investment.
“Developers would just as soon not pay for the storage of vehicles to the tune of $30K a space or somewhere around there if they don’t have to,” said Glenn Gadbois, executive director of LegacyConnect, a transportation-focused public-private nonprofit.
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada won’t bring an economic boom, but it could cushion the U.S. in the face of slowing global growth as it boosts some industries and removes a big source of business uncertainty.
The deal, reached Tuesday, also will keep U.S. trade on track with its two largest partners. U.S. trade with Mexico and Canada topped $1 trillion through October of this year, more than double the $470 billion of trade with China.
The benefits “are not so much in what USMCA brings, but rather what it prevents,” said Gregory Daco, an economist at Oxford Economics. He estimated that a U.S. withdrawal from the existing trade pact, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, without a replacement would have dented U.S. gross domestic product by 0.5% in the first year.
Giacomo Bagnara
Online shopping, when it works best, is sort of like a duck. The part above the water—the algorithmically selected products, the simple checkout process aided by personal information stored on phones, the package that appears on your porch two days later—glides placidly along, setting off only the gentlest of ripples in your attention. The apotheosis of e-commerce is when people spend money without feeling like anything has happened at all. Below the surface, the little webbed feet of retail paddle furiously.
Miceli alone takes a new bundle of packages to the post office nearly every day. This holiday season, the United States Postal Service will deliver a projected 800 million packages. Early in 2020, FedEx will start delivering on Sundays all year, a service previously reserved for the holidays.
In New York, where daily deliveries have tripled in less than a decade, trucks snarl streets and rack up nearly a half million parking tickets annually. In 2015, Amazon launched Amazon Flex, through which the company pays people to use their own cars to ferry boxes, assuming all responsibility for mileage and expenses. (Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.)
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Labor Department
The U.S. job market strengthened in November, as hiring jumped and unemployment fell, adding fuel to the economic expansion.
Employers added 266,000 jobs in November and the jobless rate fell to a 50-year low of 3.5%, matching September’s level, the Labor Department said Friday. Wages advanced 3.1% from a year earlier.
The stronger pace of hiring could help juice up the broader U.S. economy, which is still expanding but at a slower pace than last year. U.S. stocks and government-bond yields rose Friday after the data was released.
Bisnow/Miriam Hall
Meridian Capital Group Senior Executive Managing Director Helen Hwang, Morgan Stanley Executive Director Michael Givner, Hodges Ward Elliott Managing Director Paul Gillen
China’s retraction from the United States commercial real estate market has left a mark — but there are new substitutes waiting in the wings, coming from all corners of the globe.
“Within the last 24 hours I've met with a Chilean group, as well as a German group last night for a closing dinner,” Nuveen Real Estate Global Chief Operating Officer Rahul Idnani said at Bisnow’s New York 2020 Forecast event Wednesday. “It seems to me that the Canadians and the Germans, the Koreans, Singaporeans and select countries in the Middle East are very active in the New York market — as well as the rest of the United States.”
Overall, offshore investment into United States real estate has slowed from the levels seen last year. Foreign buyers dropped some $14.7B on American real estate assets in the first half of this year, compared to $19.8B during the same time period the year before, according to CBRE.
The major foreign investors that have been active in the U.S. market dropped back, Chinese players invested some $3.8B in the first half of this year, which is down 95% from their annual spending over the previous five years.
The maelstrom of rising construction costs, retailers falling into bankruptcy and looming concerns about the U.S. economy have made ambitious mixed-use projects tougher to pull off. Market experts say those factors are likely behind North American Properties' decision to back away from nearly $3B combined in major developments over the last month.
North American Properties pulled out of its $900M Revel project — a partnership with the Gwinnett County Convention and Visitors Bureau to redevelop the Infinite Energy Center into retail, apartments, offices and hotels — this week, after backing out of its partnership with GID on their planned $2B High Street project in Dunwoody last month.
“If you think you can do a very large ground-up mixed-use development this late in the cycle, it's likely to stress your pro forma,” Piedmont Office Realty Trust Executive Vice President George Wells said.
MIT Sloan Management Review
The nature of work is evolving in two complementary directions. In one direction, managers are redesigning jobs to take advantage of new opportunities to automate workflow processes. Their aim: transform how workers execute tasks in order to boost efficiencies and reduce costs. At the same time, some managers are redefining work to take advantage of new capacity freed up by job redesign.
With work redefinition, work is no longer simply about task execution; it’s about creating new sources of value for customers and the business.
Although redesigning jobs and redefining work are both integral to long-term strategy, our research shows that too many companies are focused primarily on the former. Without an overriding strategy of redefining work, workers represent cost savings rather than freed capacity to create new value for the business or the customer.
KIM SIELBECK
The immediate future of autonomous vehicles won't be about cars, but about fleets of self-driving trucks, which are set to fuel another revolution in transportation.
"The shippers are looking for and investing in that, and transportation operators are looking to take friction and cost out," says Scott Corwin, leader of Deloitte's global future of mobility practice.
Levels of autonomous driving go from zero to five--from adaptive cruise control to complete, driverless autonomy. Today, fleets can hit level two, like Boston-based Embark's trucks, which move freight autonomously on highways between L.A. and Arizona, while being monitored by human safety drivers.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
Francis Scialabba
Sometimes, innovation looks like a baby stroller/e-scooter hybrid. Other times, it resembles a giant box standing awkwardly in a New Jersey meadow.
But what warehouses lack in aesthetics, they make up for in utility. These large sheds, containing all the items you’ve ever bought online, form the skeleton of an exploding e-commerce sector.
U.S. consumers spent a record $850 billion during the 2018 holiday shopping season, a 5% bump over 2017 driven almost entirely by online sales.
Every day, more than 1.5 million deliveries are made to NYC homes, a ~4x increase over 2009.
As always, Bezos saw this before we did
Amazon has ushered in an era of astonishing shopping convenience, introducing two-day, then one-day shipping via its Prime membership service. Other retailers, including Walmart, had no choice but to play along.
Giacomo Bagnara
While guides can contain wildly disparate products, they’re mostly built on the same elements: a photo of the gift, a link to buy it, and maybe an explanation of its greatness. Often, you’ll find a small disclaimer along the lines of “All of our gifts are selected independently, and we may earn a commission if you shop through our links.”
It’s not that most writers, editors, and influencers in 2019 have any particular passion for picking out new pajamas for your sister’s kids. Instead, the internet has become a place largely fueled by shopping. Mostly unbeknownst to shoppers, purchase dollars from gift guides are often divvied up behind the scenes. A portion is kicked back to their digital inspiration, even if you wait a few weeks to buy something.
To get a share of that cash, the gift guide has expanded to fit every corner of the digital economy, pitting disparate factions of the internet against one another in a competition to recommend a new tie your dad will actually like.
Getty
In this low rate environment, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find high-quality dividend paying stocks on sale, especially the companies that have the strongest competitive advantages.
In the REIT sector, we pay very close attention to these primary advantages – cost of capital and scale – because they are the true drivers for earnings and dividend growth.
Long-term competitive advantage in a stable industry is what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger seek in a good business. It is the economic moat around each business castle. Charlie Munger said, “We’ve really made the money out of high-quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the big money has been made in the high-quality businesses. And most of the other people who’ve made a lot of money have done so in high quality businesses.”
Connie Zhou
Google expanded its LA presence last year, repurposing a historic airplane hangar to create new office space, and the results are nothing short of stunning.
The hangar, which once held the famed Spruce Goose plane, as it was derisively called, has been out of use for years. The Spruce Goose was the largest wooden plane ever built, due to wartime shortages during World War II. It flew just once, for under a minute, in 1947. It was once owned by filmmaker and pilot Howard Hughes, who also helped design the plane.
Now, the hangar where the Spruce Goose was kept for over 30 years has a second life as Google's LA office. Google worked with sustainable architecture firm ZGF to create a design that feels new and classic all at once.
Jeremy Lange, The New York Times
When Research Triangle Park in North Carolina opened in 1959, its bucolic setting was considered a major selling point. With office buildings hidden behind grassy meadows and swaths of pine forest, the quiet development was viewed as a perfect spot for the thinkers who went to work at companies like IBM and RTI International.
But tastes have changed, and in an effort to keep up, Research Triangle Park — the country’s largest corporate research park — is finally changing as well.
Plans to redevelop a portion of the park, which have been pending for eight years, are now moving forward. In a few years, Research Triangle Park, which lacks even a coffee shop within its 7,000 acres, will be home to restaurants, bars, shops and apartments.
The development’s challenges echo those of other suburban office parks around the country. Over the past decade, younger workers have come to favor urban environments that contain a variety of services and transportation options, a shift that has reduced the popularity of large, cloistered office settings.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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.
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With Thanksgiving just around the corner, most of us are saving our expressions of gratitude for the holiday. But according to scientists, counting your blessings year-round can be good for your mental health and well-being, ultimately boosting your chances of success.
In positive psychology research, gratitude is most often defined as the appreciation of things that are valuable or meaningful to you, according to Harvard Medical School.
Taking the time to be thankful and appreciative for things you have received, tangible or intangible, makes you feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improves your health, helps you deal with adversity and builds strong relationships — all crucial traits both in and out of the workplace.
Numerous studies back up these claims. A 2012 study examined the effects of Thanksgiving on well-being over a three-week period with a sample of 172 undergraduate students. Research participants reported higher levels of positive emotions on the Thanksgiving holiday than on other days of the study.
PeskyMonkey/Getty Images
It seems like we’re constantly told to pursue work that we’re passionate about. At least in the United States, this advice follows people from school and into their careers. As billionaire investor Ray Dalio advises in his book Principles, “make your passion and your work the same thing.” Doing so is said to be the path to success.
This is perhaps why a recent study found that young people rank achieving their career passion as their highest priority — above making money or getting married. Finding a fulfilling job was deemed nearly three times more important than having a family by the teenage respondents.
But, for many people, this simply isn’t feasible. Not every job affords the possibility of pursuing a passion. And most people care deeply about many different things — not all of which will be how they want to earn a living. A growing body of research suggests that pursuing your passion does indeed improve your well-being but that where you do it is far less critical. In fact, several studies show that doing something you are passionate about outside of work rather than in it benefits both your career and your personal life.
While brick-and-mortar mall merchants such as Payless, Sears and Family Dollar are dying at a record pace, more online brands are rushing to sell their wares in the glare of floodlights and the hum of cash registers. More than 1,700 physical US stores started off as digital merchants, according to Fifth Wall and Thinknum Alternative Data.
The group includes New York’s UNTUCKit, which metamorphosed from an online men’s apparel retailer into a global brand, with its 86th store opening soon in Milwaukee.
“Opening in a mall is great for our brand because the customer gets a much stickier experience, and your long-term value grows,” UNTUCKit founder Chris Riccobono told The Post. “Malls are going to become more exciting as some of the old retail guard clears out, and the new guard moves in.”
In another nod to old-fashioned shopping, Taft, the upscale online men’s footwear brand — boasting a following of over 500,000 on Instagram — last week announced the opening of its first flagship store on Prince Street in Soho.
Chris Stein/Getty Images
Recent surveys show that managers tend to consider compliance restrictions and a lack of resources as the main obstacles to innovation. This common wisdom suggests eradicating all constraints: by getting rid of rules and boundaries, creativity, and innovative thinking will thrive. Our research, however, challenges this wisdom and suggests that managers can innovate better by embracing constraints.
We reviewed 145 empirical studies on the effects of constraints on creativity and innovation, and found that individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints. It is only when the constraints become too high that they stifle creativity and innovation.
As a simple illustration of the principle, consider GE Healthcare’s MAC 400 Electrocardiograph (ECG), which revolutionized rural access to medical care. The product was the outcome of a formidable set of constraints imposed on GE engineers: develop an ECG device that boasts the latest technology, costs no more than $1 per scan, is ultra portable to reach rural communities (i.e, should be lightweight and fit into a backpack), and is battery operated. The engineers were given just 18 months and a budget of $500,000 – a very modest budget by GE’s standards, given that development of its predecessor cost $5.4 million. Our research suggests that GE engineers were not successful despite these constraints, but because of them. Constraints can foster innovation when they represent a motivating challenge and focus efforts on a more narrowly defined way forward.
Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
Technology and automation have inexorably advanced over the last few decades. They have seemingly altered everything, say some observers, but commercial real estate.
That is now rapidly changing. Dramatic tech disruption threatens the field of commercial real estate, an industry that has until now avoided that fate. Advanced technologies are being embraced by CRE companies, though at a comparatively slower pace than in other industries, according to technology and CRE observers. Change will come via the blockchain, 3D printers, AI and machine learning, robotics and automation.
In its 2019 Commercial Real Estate Outlook, Deloitte suggests technology adoption is a critical premise for the industry. It reported “many surveyed investors expect to prioritize their investments in existing and potential investee companies that respond rapidly to changes in business models and adopt a variety of technologies to make buildings future ready.” More than half (approximately 53%) of respondents feel technology gains will have the biggest effect on legacy properties within the next three years, Deloitte noted.
Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!
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