The Leader - January/February 2008 - (Page 61) “ Businesses have a different ‘ask’ of the real estate department than they had in the past. If you look at the ‘offer’ from real estate and it hasn’t changed in 20 years, you’ve got a huge disconnect. ” find talent,” he says. “We asked: ‘Is there a secondary city that might provide that source of talent?’ Let’s look at workplace strategy and see if there is an effective workplace strategy that can actually help you attract more of the local talent. “Put those together and that’s the kind of value corporations need from us today,” Noha continues. “It’s not ‘tell me about the talent issue’ or ‘tell me about the workplace issue,’ it’s ‘tell me about the whole solution.’ ” effectiveness vs. cutting costs “We have been moving toward looking at effectiveness for a long while,” Noha says. “When real estate sits at the strategic planning table to deal with issues like how to attract and retain rather than how to minimize real estate costs, it is definitely talking about effectiveness and productivity.” Another big trend he is seeing is “measuring effectiveness and productivity and coming up with a set of metrics for real estate that are absolutely aligned and linked with business objectives,” he explains. “If you are doing that, you don’t care whether it’s focused on cost or effectiveness or productivity as long as you are aligned with the business.” He says the way to really drive that home after time is to make sure the metrics are aligned with the business goals and success. “Don’t talk to me about how many square feet I have, talk to me about how quickly my bank branches are getting built allowing the business to get its revenue faster,” he says. closing the ‘ask’ and ‘offer’ Gap At Jones Lang LaSalle’s “Leading Edge” series in 2007 (an annual Jones Lang LaSalle event), the theme was “Closing the Gap between the ‘Ask’ of the Business and the ‘Offer’ from Real Estate.” Businesses are looking at globalization and risk and attacting and retaining people, he says. “They have a different ‘ask’ of the real estate department than they had in the past,” Noha says. “If you look at the ‘offer’ from real estate and it hasn’t changed in 20 years, you’ve got a huge disconnect. They way to connect the two is clearly to develop location strategies, portfolio strategies, financial strategies, etc., but what we find is that real estate organizations may not have the foundation to be able to create those strategies.” Noha and his partner, Tom Bomba, (together they head the Portfolio Strategy Practice within Consulting at Jones Lang LaSalle), developed a diagnostic that shows there are five pillars to creating that foundation that allow real estate to create strat- 2 0 0 8 the le ade r 61 J aN Ua rY / F e B rUa r Y
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