Over at HBR is a good article titled Executives Get the IT They Deserve. It definitely takes a traditional enterprise view of technology instead of acknowledging the disruption but it asks the right questions and makes you think.
For me the biggest thing about it was in understanding the role of corporate leadership in leading to outcomes. Lack of decisions leads to low-tier or mediocre results. Lack of vision leads to disjointed and less than optimal outcomes. If it is true for IT it is even more true for Real Estate.
Real Estate turns over every 3 to 7 years for almost every company around. Even if you own your buildings you are (or should be) turning over through churn, redesigns, improvements, etc. A lack of leadership leads to each decision being independent. Each interior design being different from the others. Money being spent to deliver without standards. Employee confusion as to how their office is supposed to function.
Real Estate leadership is more than just managing the cost of real estate. Real Estate impacts HR (through impacts on recruiting, retention, work-from-home, work styles), IT (through specifying furniture and collaboration space that needs certain tools), Finance (one of the biggest costs to the balance sheet), Marketing (it’s easiest to market in locations where you have a physical presence), Supply Chain (where you have warehouses and manufacturing sort of defines a big part of your supply chain) and just about every other group out there.
When there is no real estate leadership there is no group in a company that is more disliked. Bad real estate decisions lead to difficult to manage businesses. However, when real estate is working well it makes the business that much easier to manage.
You get the real estate you deserve based on how you treat the function.