The Leader - November/December 2007 - (Page 63)

perspect Ives: the evolv ING real estate I ND ustry were really beginning to pull together around integrated workplace councils or teams. That continues to be very much in evidence. I just learned about another company that’s put one together focused on workplace effectiveness. It’s a crossdiscipline, integrated team that is pulled together to look at issues of workplace and in particular more holistically. But what’s striking to me, though, is that you still see uncertainty on the part of all those parties regarding who should drive, who should lead. And I sometimes feel like I encounter situations where everybody around that table is pointing to the others and saying, ‘Are you going to drive this?’ I think it’s still a fundamental question for Real Estate around its willingness and ability to drive. I think it’s a huge opportunity, but it’s still something that has a little bit of a hot-potato feeling around it even though people are more and more seeing it’s an absolute necessity to pull together. It leads me to a hypothesis or question around whether in some ways it could be helpful to think of workplace as a fourth discipline. I have yet to see this, and I’d love to know about it if it exists, but a company might pull out workplace and have it be kind of a neutral partner whose job it is expressly to orchestrate Real Estate, IT, HR, and others. It would be neutral to all of them, because for some reason everybody sees the necessity but in many instances, no one wants to drive. And I think it would be quite interesting to see a company take a perspective like that, to deliberately orchestrate all those pieces but perhaps define it as a distinct discipline, just as logistics was defined as a distinct discipline at one time I still very much have my eye on this issue. I talk to companies about it every week, so it hasn’t gone away. But I can’t say that it has entirely been solved by any means. leaDer: The CRE and workplace industry is changing rapidly. What are some of the other key trends to watch for over the next two to three years? ellzey: One of the things I would say is that I think that we are going to be continuing to see this closer alignment with HR due to the talent issue a lot of companies are facing. In the most strategic real estate organizations, you are seeing that alignment more and more, that linkage into HR. So I would be looking to see how that might continue. We are also noticing people with a nonreal estate background coming into the real estate space and learning the business – not necessarily entering it through the traditional real estate pathway. We’re seeing more involvement where people from the business side are coming into real estate at all levels. The mix of real estate professional and business professionals working together in our industry is very exciting. The other piece, I’d say, is the globalization of corporations. We talk about that a lot, but it’s really different when companies have kind of an international model and they manage the real estate on an international basis vs. a truly global model. The companies that embrace the global model will be large, they’ll be sophisticated, and they’ll be very demanding. They are already challenging and reaching out to the service provider industry in wholly positive ways. I think we’re going to see more and more of that, of very seamless processes on a global basis. To expand upon that point, in general, as the business goes organizationally, so We are also noticing people with a non-real estate background coming into the real estate space and learning the business - not necessarily entering it through the traditional real estate pathway. goes Real Estate. And Real Estate will be delivering and be poised in the context of the overall business strategy and organizational strategy. As a company evolves from being focused on products and services and ultimately to having more of a customer focus, the Real Estate team will go through those same phases of focus. I don’t think it’s an accident that you see such a continued focus on the CRM model in Real Estate. My hypothesis is it’s because the enterprise itself has gone through some kind of realignment around its external customers…and the customer focus naturally cascades to real estate and other functions from there. I’d be looking for how much change we’re seeing in corporate structure, organization and governance and take our cues about real estate and where we’re headed from where corporations are headed. That to me would be the big driver to look for, and I think it will tell us the most about our direction over the long term. 2 0 07 the le aDe r 63 November / December

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of The Leader - November/December 2007

The Leader - November/December 2007 Leadership Contents Message from the CEO Real Estate in the News Investing in India 110 to One Smaller Workspaces, Better Workspaces Innovating the Workplace Through Design Sustainability and Energy Efficiency Getting It Right Using Location Intelligence to Reinvent Franchises Philips International’s Ron Blanken CB Richard Ellis’ Karen Ellzey The State of Louisiana’s Mike Olivier Industry Tracker Economic Developer Directory Discovery Forum Findings Career Development Emerging Leader Economic Development in the News A Look Ahead Executive Development Spotlight

The Leader - November/December 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.