Is CRE original writing beginning to flag?

I was in New York last week and had a very intriguing conversation with a colleague about the state of CRE conversations on social media.  He made a point to me about how everything has been oversaturated and it was the same things over and over without anything unique in between.  This made me think about the evolution of buzzwords and how industry thinkers can easily fall into groupthink.

In CRE one of the biggest buzzwords of the last 20 years is Workplace.  Fix your workplace through culture.  Improve your productivity through workplace design.  Reduce your costs by focusing on the workplace.  Every one of these are true.  Every one of these are obvious.  Every one of these are a waste of the pixels that display their text.

You will not find anyone in our industry who believes that workplace and the concepts around them are unimportant.  Workplace is probably the single most important aspect of well functioning real estate.  But generic thoughts on the subject are fruitless.  What we need are the writers to blend IT and Workplace – why having three monitors on every desk will save you millions (maybe I should take a crack at this one).  Writers to tell the virtues of social media use during the workday toward productivity.  When need people who are willing to push back on work from home – or collaboration – to take on the too readily accepted truisms of real estate.

Yes, there are plenty of people out there doing exactly this.  But it’s time for us to push them to the forefront and take back the conversation.