If you’re a fan like I am of Chip and Dan Heath you probably already know they’ve got a new book out called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. They begin by asking a provocative question: Why do some huge changes like marriage come joyously while some trivial changes like using a new expense report meet with huge resistance?
They boil it down to this: our rational mind is sometimes at war with our emotional mind. Each side can help drive or resist change. (We want to get in shape but it is more fun to sit on the couch and play Guitar Hero.) The Heaths offer lots of good advice for driving change by appealing to each side of our nature. Along the way they advise:

•Follow the bright spots – find what’s working, celebrate it and clone it
•Script the critical small parts of the change – think in terms of very specific behaviors you want to change
•Point to the destination – make it clear where you’re going and why it’s worth it
•Find the feeling – rational recounting of benefits costs and benefits doesn’t always work. Find way to make a simple emotional connection with the desired change
•Shrink the change – break down the change into small parts that are manageable
•Build good habits – when behavior becomes a habit it doesn’t overtax our brains
•Rally the herd – behavior is contagious as we all learned in junior high school, so help good behavior spread

The Heath brothers write for Fast Company and are masters of following the communications advice they put forth in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Throughout their new book they offer surprising, compelling anecdotes and revisit them to illustrate and underscore their messages.

Lots of fun. You’ll enjoy this one! If you want to experience a sample check out their website for this book:

http://heathbrothers.com/switch/

To Catch a Wave You have to Be in Front of It

When times get bad the conventional wisdom is to hunker down and wait things out. Reduce the risk and cost today and get back out there fishing after the tide turns. This kind of thinking is natural and has some merit. Why risk precious limited capital on something new?

The most innovative companies, though, realize these tough times actually offer the best opportunities to create new products, tap into new markets and find new ways to reduce costs. Tough times don’t prohibit innovation; they demand it.
Innovating now offers some clear benefits:

•The new products and services take a bit of time to develop. Do it now and you’ll be poised to capitalize when the market rebounds. Get in front of that wave so you can surf it to the shore, step off the board and get a pina colada from the beach bar
•You’ll develop a competitive advantage. While other companies are hunkering down you can improve your cost position or develop killer new products. These advantages will be real and sustainable
•You can energize your workforce by focusing on the future and exploring new ideas rather than experience the doom loop spiral of fear/retrenchment/lower productivity/slipping revenues/fear/retrenchment, etc.

Innovation doesn’t have to be huge or risky. You can make more runs by hitting a bunch of singles rather than have everyone swing for the fences and miss. Lower your innovation costs by making lots of small investments in projects, finding out what’s working and putting more resources behind the winners.

The Next Generation of Virtual Work: Anywhere and Anytime (Part 1)

Here’s a deceptively tough question to answer if you have people reporting to you: Do you care more about what your team produces, or more about the hours they are in the office? Be honest. You might think it’s obvious – of COURSE you care more about the work. But how do you feel when you need to talk to someone right away and they are out on a two hour lunch?

Reverse the perspective: Do you want your boss to focus more on your great work or more on counting the hours you are in the office where they can see you? Have you ever watched the clock until you get to the “acceptable” hour to leave, even though you have long since finished your important work for the day?

Thankfully, the workplace is evolving from “9 – 5 in the office” (did anyone ever work 9 – 5?) to a more virtual approach where people can work in any location, from home, the office, or a Starbucks. The next logical phase of the evolution? Going from working anywhere to working anytime.

Best Buy is the real pioneer here, creating a program called Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE). In their headquarters facilities workers are now free to work anytime, anywhere as long as the work gets done. No more face time, no more pointless meetings to prove you are doing something. What matters most is the results.

By any measure ROWE has been a tremendous success. Best Buy claims a 41% increase in productivity and a 91% decrease in voluntary turnover. (That productivity number is based on self-reported results by ROWE workers. If you don’t believe them, cut their number in half: a 20% improvement is still terrific.)

ROWE – Part 2

Maybe your company or even your department isn’t quite ready for as radical as Best Buy’s Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE). After all, we’re still working our way through the Great Recession, green shoots notwithstanding, and no one wants to be perceived as slacking off. However, you can start a micro experiment in your own little group and see how it works for you.
Here are four reasons you should try:

1. You can get more and better work from your teammates. The dirty little secret of virtual work programs is that people actually work MORE when they are in control of their environment. ROWE, the next generation of virtual work, can only increase these dynamics.

2. Workers will demand it. Maybe your older workers are still watching the clock but your younger workers have different priorities. All you should really care about is this: how well they produce.

3. In these tough economic times it is a great way to reduce costs. You can reduce your costs of real estate because you’ll need less space for fewer time clock punchers. You can also reduce your costs of turnover: hiring, training, productivity ramp-up, etc., because workers will be happier.

4. It’s good for the environment. People will need to drive less in a ROWE environment, and will most likely produce fewer paper stacks of PowerPoint presentations.

Remember the feeling you had as a kid when you begged the teacher to have class outside? And she agreed? Wouldn’t it be great if your job gave you that same feeling every day?

Is What You Do Art or Science? (or Both?)

I like to think all of our jobs are a combination of art and science. The “Art” part is getting more artistic and the “Science” part is getting more scientific.

The science part is easier to explain. We are becoming more expert at mapping and improving the processes of our work, and using more sophisticated analytics to diagnose problems and identify opportunities. We squeeze out the waste, juice up the productivity, shave the costs and boost the revenues. The bar keeps getting raised and we keep figuring out ways to hurdle it.

The richer analytics, in particular, help us understand not only what has happened but also give us better insight into what will happen. We figure out how to create opportunities in emerging markets. Innovation moves from being a luxury to becoming a critical success factor for competitive advantage.

We can analyze and engineer the processes to death but we can’t manufacture the creative spark that’s at the heart of innovation. Similarly, we can’t engineer the ability to connect dots or look at famliar landscapes with fresh eyes.

Innovation, creativity, connecting dots, fresh perspective – mastery of these skills is truly an Art. They can’t be measured but they’re as critical to success.

In the olden days of the 1990’s jobs could pretty easily be divided into two camps: those requiring creative skills and those requiring technical skills. People who held those jobs were either “poets” or “toolies.” Today we’re no longer bound by those arbitrary distinctions; in fact our jobs today demand mastery of both. Depending on your skill set this notion can be liberating or intimidating, but I think it’s part of the new rules for business.

Capital One and the Future of Work

Tom Davenport, a professor at Babson college, says there are “three primary influences on knowledge worker productivity: Management, Information Technology, and Workplace. Workplace is the least understood, researched and studied.” He’s right but there are some companies that are making breakthroughs.

Capital One is one of the most innovative companies in the workplace industry and some of their best ideas are captured in a program they call “Future of Work.” They took a hard look at their workforce and they saw three key trends:

1. The workforce was becoming more distributed through alternative work and increased use of technology. At any point in time between 40% and 60% of their workspaces were empty – people were working, just not in their dedicated cubicles and offices (When I hear stats like this I am always reminded of that old adage about advertising spending: half of it is wasted, we just don’t know which half.)

2. The war for talent would drive companies to be more accommodating of their associates’ needs and their competitor’s offerings

3. People were literally running out of time. Because they were working more hours and spending more time on chores and errands, people’s free time per week was cut in half.

The folks at Cap One saw an opportunity to create a program that would meet the changing needs of their colleagues, support their improved productivity and reduce their real state costs. They called it ”Future of Work” and built it around these core components:

• Greater integration between IT, HR and Workplace and the collaboration to create new tools and programs to support Future of Work throughout the company
• New work settings including collaboration rooms, technology rooms, dedicated offices, quiet zones, lounges, and huddle and enclave rooms.Not only did Cap One workers have better tools, they had more choice about where and how to apply them.

The “Future of Work” people carefully measured changes as a result of the program implementation and found workers were more productive and more satisfied. The quality of their work improved and their company operating costs decreased.

This all sounds too good to be true but the findings are similar to those Best Buy discovered with its “Results Oriented Work Environment.” When you give people autonomy and flexibility they actually produce more and are happier, all while saving the company money. Why aren’t more companies catching on?

Capital One is one of the pioneers. Learn more about their program here…

What are the Biggest Ways Sustainability Will Change Management Thinking?

Michael S. Hopkins wrote recently in the MIT Sloan Management Review about several ways sustainability is changing the way executives think. His fascinating article is part of a larger issue devoted to these sorts of sustainability questions. Some of Hopkins’ key points:

• PRODUCTIVITY The 16% Solution – Most people can point to reduced energy costs as the way sustainability boosts productivity (lower costs with same output). The bigger factor – the hidden factor – is worker productivity. Green workplaces with better light, thermal comfort and acoustic privacy drive a reported 16% increase in worker productivity. These gains are a lot greater than the simple energy saves everyone accepts. (Note: each company has its own data for productivity increase. Some are questionable because they’re reported by the associates themselves, but cut these reported gains in half and they’re still significant.)

• STRATEGY The Better Vantage Point (Or Seeing the System and Connecting the Dots) When you’re studying saves and revenues from sustainability efforts you often have to look across silos and measure total cost vs. total benefit. (See worker productivity increase from bricks-and-mortar investments in green buildings.) You are required to see how the pieces fit together and function

• INNOVATION You Can’t Get There From Here … But You Can From Somewhere Else – One of my favorite points from the article goes back to an earlier post I made about sustainability and innovation. The author states “Sustainability challenges demand innovation that’s more iterative, more patient, requiring more diverse inputs…It creates different conversations, raises different questions.”

• ADVANTAGE First Adapters Will Win Being the first in the market means you create Brand equity that drives a truly sustainable advantage. Quick, name a hybrid car. Did you say Prius? Bet you did. Can you name five others? Didn’t think so.

Take a look at this provocative issue and read about other ways sustainability is changing management thinking.

Sustainability – The Secret Sauce for Innovation?

Ram Nidumolu and C.K. Prahalad wrote a fascinating piece in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review titled “Why Sustainability is Now the Key Driver of Innovation.” They argue that, given the current regulatory and consumer mindset, sustainability is the logical and critical component for future innovation.

You know how martial artists always talk about redirecting the opponent’s energy against him to gain an advantage? (OK, maybe I’ve watched one too many Bruce Lee movies but trust me, they do.) I was reminded of that dynamic when the authors we sketching the current pitched battle between governments, companies and consumer advocates. It seems the most visionary companies could be viewing the increasing calls for more sustainable products and operations as a golden opportunity to innovate for greater profits, lower costs, and the creation of a competitive advantage.

Nidumolu and Prahalad call sustainability “innovation’s new frontier” and lay out five stages for companies who want to move forward:

• Stage 1: Viewing Compliance as Opportunity – it’s smarter to comply with the most stringent rules up front. Since you’ll be doing the same things everywhere you can create economies of scale and gain a first-mover advantage in the market. Energy companies see increasing government regulation and are creating a smart grid to help respond.

• Stage 2: Making Value Chains Sustainable- Once companies have their own houses in order they should turn to their supply chains. These vendors typically use 80% of the energy, water and other resources for a given product and it makes sense to drive the sustainability message through the entire team. In doing so, most corporations end up reducing costs (Wal-Mart?) and creating new businesses (Waste Management?) as well.

• Stage 3: Designing Sustainable Products and Services- businesses can score over rivals by being the
first to redesign existing products or develop new ones. Procter & Gamble has developed a highly profitable new line of green cleaning products endorsed by the Sierra Club.

• Stage 4: Developing New Business Models – Designing new products and services will lead to developing a new business model. While I’d have thought the model had to be in place before the products and services, the authors note the reverse is true. I guess the developer who offers recycling in an existing building today will be building greener buildings tomorrow. In the process they may be targeting new customers and rethinking the way they work with local planners.

• Stage 5: Creating Next-Practice Platforms- The authors say “To develop innovations that lead to next practices, executives must question the implicit assumptions behind current practices.” I’ve often wondered why we still rely most heavily on landlords to sign long leases when companies’ needs for space change from year to year. We talk about flexibility now in terms like expansion or contraction clauses, but what if space were offered on demand? Regus does it for individuals and small businesses, but could this model be adapted for corporate use? What if traveling associates could drop in to flexible space in any city they way they do in airline clubs in airports?

They offer a few simple rules for putting these ideas into practice. These rules strike me as applicable to any kind of business planning, but think about them in the context of innovation:

• Don’t start from the present. - Most people commit the myopic error of defining the future in terms of the present. These guys are telling us to do the reverse.

• Ensure that learning precedes investments. – The smart companies start small, learn fast, and scale rapidly. Stay wedded to the goal while constantly adjusting tactics – You have to be able to hold to your long term vision while adapting to immediate changes in the market.

• Build collaborative capacity – The Durst Organization, Cook+Fox, and Bank of America collaborated closely with a myriad of suppliers to build (what will become) the country’s first platinum high rise. They redefined they way partners work together to create a dramatic breakthrough in Manhattan

It’s a great article. To read it and learn more about the authors follow this link…


http://hbr.org/2009/09/why-sustainability-is-now-the-key-driver-of-innovation/ar/1

Competing on (Real Estate) Analytics: Some Ideas for Anti-Geeks

Have you read Moneyball by Michael Lewis? It’s one of my favorite books because it tells an entertaining story about how an underdog, underfunded team like Oakland turned the baseball game around by using analytics to challenge conventional wisdom. They hired a fancy Harvard economist to figure out what REALLY mattered when it came to winning games. Based on rigorous statistical analysis they were able to hire unlikely players for less money who actually won more games. Their approach has since been copied by most major teams with great success, most notably Boston (who has the smarts AND the money to hire conventional stars, too.)

Why don’t we do a better job of analyzing our data in real estate? The dealmakers do a great job of understanding market trends but you’d be hard pressed to find many people who are doing deep, rigorous statistical analysis. That’s unfortunate but it also opens up a real opportunity for the early companies who will figure it out. They’ll have the competitive advantage over the dinosaurs who are still struggling to explain budget variances.

Budget variance analysis might tell you WHAT happened but you have to go deeper to find out WHY. You have to go even deeper to figure out what’s GOING to happen in the future. Here’s a simple graphic from the book Competing on Analytics, a terrific book by Thomas Davenport.


I’d venture a guess and say most of us are pretty comfortable in the bottom couple of categories and we all get less comfortable as we move towards the top. If you stop and think about it, though, there are some really compelling questions that can only be answered in those top four categories:

• How can we optimize our portfolio of buildings to drive down the total life cycle cost of real estate?
• How can we do that portfolio optimization but factor in changing labor market dynamics to understand the total cost for people and place?
• How can we understand the potential sales revenue in the market to understand the total VALUE of an optimized portfolio (lower costs, higher revenue at the optimal investment level)?
• How can we increase the efficiency of work order dispatch to factor in varying skill sets, pay rates, self-perform vs. outsource decisions, etc?
• How do we do a better job forecasting headcount?
• How can we model energy consumption to reduce our costs and carbon footprint?
There are lots of smart people and smart companies out there who can help us all answer those types of questions but first we need to be asking them. The companies that ask and answer those questions first will have a competitive advantage over the ones who don’t.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

I love, love, love this book! The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, are brothers who explored the idea of “stickiness” put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point They’ve co-written a book which lays out six characteristics necessary to make your presentation, recommendation or idea “stick” in the minds of those you’re targeting. Thos characteristics are:

Success – find the core of any idea
Unexpected – grab the people’s attention by surprising them
Concrete – make sure the idea can be grasped and remembered later
Credibility – give an idea believability
Emotion – help the people see the importance of the idea
Stories – empower people to use an idea through narrative

One of my teammates, Ben, is a master at making things sticky. He has a double major in philosophy and economics from Yale and is responsible for the heavy duty analytics on our broader team. He was trying to explain how the use of recursive partitioning (a method for multivariable analysis using decision trees to classify dichotomous, dependent variable… don’t ask) could help us figure out which buildings and people were performing best and why.

He found a blog where a guy described sorting socks (I guess there truly IS a blog for everything) and turned that into a simple analogy to describe the analytical technique. He then went on to engage the audience in a series of questions to fill in the blanks on a tool he built and – voila! – we had our best performers. Not only did we feel great about understanding our buildings and people, we also felt vaguely superior for understanding recursive partitioning. Sticky.

If you haven’t read the book please follow this link [link] and check it out on Amazon. The Heaths also write for Fast Company and have a blog here. [link]

Total Cost of Ownership: To a Man With a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

In the real estate industry we tend to think a lot about bricks and mortar but not so much about how that bricks and mortar combines with other costs over the life of the building to create (or reduce) value for our customers and shareholders. We’re focused so much on our hammer that everything looks like a nail.

The IT industry has done a better job of tackling this question, looking not only at first costs but at hidden costs, related costs, and total life cycle costs. The US Green Building Council has also explored total cost as it justifies green investment by citing greater productivity and lower turnover.

When we run the numbers in real estate, though, we have a tendency to look at first costs and operating costs of bricks and mortar and not much else. That limited view can paint the wrong picture, though. Consider this hypothetical:

You need to build a call center and found sites in City A and City B. The real estate costs are a higher in City A but the labor is much cheaper and just as competent as that in City B. Which city do you choose?

For any kind of investment there are hidden costs (maybe higher maintenance?) related costs (maybe greater taxes) and costs we’ll encounter down the road (maybe faster obsolescence.) When we make our decisions we should be looking at the total cost of ownership.

Mind of the Innovator

I’m intrigued by the work of Matthew May, a real thought leader and the author of The Elegant Solution and In Pursuit of Elegance.

http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Solution-Toyotas-Mastering-Innovation/dp/0743290178/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265333630&sr=8-1

He has looked at lots of different companies to understand how and why innovation works (or not.) He has found seven critical derailers when it comes to innovation including:

• Talking shortcuts and leaping to solutions. Like in the rest of life, when you try to cut corners your innovative “solutions” usually don’t work
• Having blind spots. We rely on muscle memory, assumptions, biases and such to go down familiar paths to the same old (sub-optimal) destination
• Dismissing solutions that were “not invented here.” If you think you don’t do this sort of thing, how many times have you gone to an elevator bank and re-pushed a lighted button that someone had already pushed before you?
• Not pushing ourselves deeply and broadly to find even better solutions than the first ones we come up with
• Making compromises and then compensating by trying to sell the benefits of our sub-optimal ideas (cutting corners)
• Making things too complicated. This might seem to contradict the point above, but remember Einstein said “Everything should be made as simple as possible and not one bit simpler.”
• Stifling or dismissing the ideas of people who might be “lower” on the corporate ladder, newer to the team or seem to have less experience

Matthew May is a brilliant writer and he’s got a terrific blog here… take a look!
http://www.inpursuitofelegance.com/

The Ultimate Visual Thinker

Jessica Hagy is an insanely talented thinker/artist with the rare ability to capture big ideas in small pictures. It seems too pat to classify her as a mere cartoonist but her drawings can sometimes make you laugh out loud.
She has a terrific blog called indexed and you can find it here. indexed.blogspot.com. Her work has been published in a nifty little book called Indexed which you can buy it here.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0142005207?tag=neotakucom-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0142005207&adid=0HYFZD8HY3CJ71NE64NH&
Here are a couple of her ideas to whet your appetite:

Sorry




Fitting In



Yes, There is Always Another Option



Work With What You’ve Got



My own take on her work:

Corporate Real Estate 2.0

Welcome and thanks so much for visiting my new blog. I’ve held lots of jobs in corporate real estate over the last 20 years and here’s the thing I’ve come to realize: it’s not about the bricks and mortar. Not at all.

There’s a wonderful saying that goes something like this: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think in the world of real estate we sometimes get so obsessed with building and dealing and managing and operating that we forget what we’re doing it for. We think about the bricks and mortar because we’re real estate people, but why are we doing all this stuff in the first place? We do it because we’re enabling people to work, to serve their own customers. Everything we do is supporting a means to that end.

A friend of mine once said he wanted to drag the real estate industry kicking and screaming into the next century: the 20th century. He’s right. We might be using new(ish) tools but we’re firmly rooted in the 1800’s when it comes to the way our industry works. Look at the way we do deals. The way we operate buildings. In this flat, virtual world we’re still tending to the bricks and mortar. When it comes to resisting change we’re better than the buggy-whip makers, but not by much.

I’m kind of obsessed about ideas in workplace, especially when it comes to the powerful integration of technology, real estate and human resources. I think integration of those three forces will be the key to dynamic change (and maybe to survival?) and ideas will drive that integration.

Please visit me regularly. I’m going to interview some thought leaders in our industry and share some cool ideas about changes and challenges. I’m passionate about some things (sustainability) and plain curious about others (the power of advanced analytics). I’m suspicious and skeptical, interested and engaged, but always thinking about how we can make things better.

If you’ve got ideas or questions of your own I hope you’ll let me know. Let’s explore this thing together.

This is going to be cool.

Reducing Your Power Consumption: Unplugged

There are lots of simple, free steps you can take to reduce your energy consumption and lower your power bills. You’ll be reducing your company’s carbon footprint and making your CFO happy by lowering expenses, all without investing capital. A the same time you’ll make your co-workers happy by engaging them to make their workplace greener.

Kind of like an analog to Reduce - Reuse - Recycle mantra, when it come to energy you should reduce the amount of energy you use, and for the power you DO need you should make its sources as green as possible.

The “Reduce” step is dandy because it can be free: no investment is required to start realizing significant savings. Your father yelling at you all those years to turn off the lights? He was onto something. Here are five suggestions to start you out, but I bet you can look t your actual workplace and come up with a lot more:

• Turn off lights in conference rooms, bathrooms and other common areas that are not always in use. If you want to get a little fancier you can install motion sensors but we’re trying to stick to free measures here
• Turn down your thermostat. Set the temperature a little higher in the summer and lower in the winter
• Turn off your computers overnight
• Power off any unused AV equipment. HD TV’s are notorious energy hogs, even when they are sitting idle. Plug them into a power strip and then turn off the power strip overnight
• Use less stuff. If you are part of a big company you should explore server virtualization and other measures to reduce your IT load. If you are a smaller operation unplug those appliances in the breakroom. Your local soft drink distributors all have programs to reduce power usage in vending machines.

In a later article I’ll talk about “Reduce” steps you can take that require a small investment but have pretty quick paybacks. In the meantime, I’m going to go unplug something…

No Caves for the Cavemen

In his book The Future of Work Thomas Malone described an environment where knowledge based businesses would be run as loosely based hierarchies or self-managed democracies. Highly skilled workers would group, disband and regroup based on the different project challenges. The focus would be on the work product and ad hoc teams would be created based on each player’s expertise for that specific product.
We can see that happening, more and more, as companies adopt virtual work programs with associates free to work when, where and how they need to so they can produce the best work for the company.

What will the physical workplaces look like to best support that approach? The companion book to Malone’s might be called The Future of the Workplace.
Seems to me they’ll have to be as nimble and flexible as the workers and projects themselves. The workplace itself will become virtual, and be defined less by bricks and mortar and more by technology. That workplace of the future will need to have the following characteristics:

• Lots of different types of workspaces for teaming, individual work, brainstorming, relaxing and so forth
• Super flexibility. It can be quickly reconfigured (in hours or days, not weeks or months)
• Green. Workers, customers and shareholders will demand more sustainable work practices and the environment to support them.
• More seamless integration of bricks and mortar and technology. They’ll really blend to become “the work environment” and cease to be separate teams/components.

The corner office ideal may never go away; it’s in our lexicon just like “9 to 5.” But who works 9 to 5 anymore? Just as they way we work is changing, the places we work in will need to change, too.

Why Go Green? A Clear-eyed Manifesto for the Anti-Tree Hugger

Put aside for a minute those arguments about environmental responsibility and doing the right thing. Silence your inner tree-hugger. There are some hard core, red-blooded reasons that you and your company should be considering the option of going green. Here are seven reasons to act:

1. You can increase your revenue. According to real estate studies cited in the 11/13 issue of NREI corporate users say they would pay a 3% premium for rent in a green building. In addition to charging more to your tenants or subtenants, you can also take advantage of government incentives and tax advantages and rebates from utilities.

2. You can reduce your operating costs. You can lower your utilities costs by investing in projects with a quick payback. There are simple measures you can take (such as installing LED lighting) which have same year payback, and other, more exotic measures which take longer but save you money and reduce maintenance costs, too. Some insurers (e.g., Novato) offer lower rates for green buildings.

3. It’s a hedge against energy cost volatility. This point is the companion to the one above. We all remember $4 gasoline prices and many experts predict greater volatility of oil prices gong forward. Goldman Sachs predicts oil will rise to $95 a barrel in 2010, an increase of about 25% vs. today’s prices. The reasons for this increase are simple: surging world economies mean greater demand for oil, increased volatility in the Middle East, and reduced production from OPEC.

4. Government regulation will require it. It’s coming and we all know it. There are major federal initiatives making their way through Congress (cap & trade, and the Kerry-Boxer bill) and some states have already passed tougher requirements (California’s new CALGREEN legislation.) Local building codes are changing, too.

5. Associate productivity increases (and they care about sustainability). Studies show that absenteeism decreases, turnover declines, and associates self-report greater productivity when working in green workplaces. These factors translate to lower labor costs for companies. Also, employees care more and more about their employers’ commitment to sustainability. In the war for talent, sustainability can be one of your secret weapons.

6. Your competitors are already doing it. The number of green buildings was up by 47% in 2009 according to USGBC and the pipeline indicates the number of certified buildings will quintuple in the next year or two. If you aren’t becoming more sustainable you are losing ground to your competition. How does that impact your brand? Your earnings and stock price?

7. It will help our country become less dependent on imported oil. The more we increase our energy efficiency and migrate to renewable and low carbon resources, the less we depend on a few volatile countries to supply us with the energy to run our economy.

Improving sustainability is one of the few win/win opportunities readily available. There are lots of arguments to be made for going green but if you’re one of the pragmatists who has resisted being swept up in a swirl of green euphoria please consider these real-world benefits and act now. It’s in your company’s best interest.

Rigor, Not Rigor Mortis

A lot of people in real estate cast a suspicious eye on six sigma discipline. They either think it is the flavor of the month and will soon be displaced with some newer, flashier substitute, or they think you need to be some kind of math wizard to understand and use it. They also associate it with factory floors and the production of widgets, not something you can use in the workplace. They’re missing a great opportunity.

Six sigma is just this: common sense, rigorously applied. You can use these techniques to dramatically lower your costs and improve the quality of your services.
In six sigma you use a common sense framework for defining the problem, gathering information to help you understand it, analyzing that information, coming up with a solution, then tracking to make sure that solution actually worked. There are off-the-shelf six sigma tools to help you in each of those phases.

Like all management disciplines, it should be deployed with balance and care. You don’t need to deploy a green belt team for six months to invent a new process for changing the paper in the copier, you just need to whip out a fresh pack and drop it in the drawer. On the other hand, if it takes you too long to move a team from point A to point B then this discipline might help you.

I’ve seen six sigma discipline used to discover some amazing things and to debunk a lot of pre-conceived notions. I’ve personally been involved in leading or supporting initiatives which saved millions of dollars and turned conventional thinking on its head. Here are some tips I often suggest for those who are new to the discipline:
• Read the thinnest, shortest book on six sigma you can find. There’s a dandy one called What is Six Sigma that clocks in at five ounces and about 85 pages and tells you everything you need to know if you r a newbie.
• Go to websites. There’s a great one at www.isixsigma.com which lets you read articles, surf around to find answers to questions and provides some free off-the-shelf tools and templates.
• Ask someone who knows. There are lots of smart, passionate people out there who are dedicated to using these tools to make people’s lives easier.
Some of the best six sigma tools are qualitative in nature so don’t be intimidated by the numbers or jargon. Just dive in and have fun!
 

Some of the Most Fascinating People on Earth

If you haven’t been to the TED Talks site and spent some time surfing around it, you owe it to yourself to stop reading this article, click on the link below and GO!

TED, an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design, bills itself modestly and simply as “a non-profit devoted to ideas worth spreading.” It’s really like the most fascinating cocktail party in the world, with thought leaders in different disciplines sharing their findings, works in progress and ideas about where things are heading. TED Talks are short videos and the site functions as a sort of YouTube for thinking people.

You can find the famous and the brilliant at that site, but also obscure people who have knockout creative ideas. Let your imagination and your own interests direct you to the speakers you’ll like best.

Since this is a site about workplace ideas I will direct you first to David Kelly, the founder of IDEO and leader of Stanford’s d-school. His firm designed the first mouse, the TREO and the Leap chair. In short, his ideas have helped shape the way we work today. Take a look at the video and listen to his ideas about “human-centered design” which factors behavior and personality into the product.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_on_human_centered_design.html

Real Estate Innovation is Not an Oxymoron

This year’s CoreNet Global Innovator’s Award winners prove again that the most important things in life are simple, but not easy. The Mindshift Consortium has proven that basic steps like creating a trusting team, collaborating early and well, and creating client centered incentives can transform the way our industry does business. My favorite example: They built Signature Center, a LEED Platinum building in Golden, Colorado, for $3 less per SF than conventional buildings. Take THAT, folks who believe LEED automatically costs more!

Mindshift is a consortium comprised of premier industry players: Gensler, Turner, Haworth, AIA and GSA among others. Their Thought Leader (that’s his job title!) is Rex Miller and he captured the consortium’s nine basis operating principles in the book, The Commercial Real Estate Revolution, and demonstrated its success in using them to drive some amazing reductions in cost, waste and schedule.
Part of their breakthrough thinking comes in looking at the total life cycle of a project, not just the up front costs. That “total life cycle” view is a theme we’ll return to again and again at Workplace Ideas.
Congratulations to the folks at Mindshift! Here’s a link to their book on Amazon. Check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Real-Estate-Revolution-Transforming/dp/0470457465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263769635&sr=8-1