Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This 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.

1. Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus Crisis

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.

2. Open Office Concept Isn't Dead, But Does Require A Lot Of Care And Attention

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.”

3. Nine Ways to Make Your Work Day Better

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.

4. Term Sheet Tips for Tenants: What You Need to Know

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.

5. The Best Thing You Can Do for Your Work Is Take a Walk

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!

Ken Ashley