Blackberry or iPhone or Android? Do you care? Do you carry your own phone or a company phone? Do you care? When you have a problem to solve do you Google it or ask IT for help? Are you a Microsoft Word person or Google Docs? There’s nothing wrong with being corporate. Just like there’s…
Market Efficiency
The Chevy Volt was supposed to usher in the age of the electric car. How many have you seen on the road in the months that it has been available? The sad thing about innovative products that are supposed to open new markets is that for every iPod there are 20 failures. It’s not for…
The Quality Real Estate Department
Quality in Real Estate is not one of those topics that is discussed regularly. It’s a very tough proposition to define because real estate can be a very strange function. You have a fixed asset that you don’t own that supports every business function in the business. Changing the asset is extremely capital intensive and…
Death of Manufacturing
For some reason I thought this was a Harvard Business Review post as I was reading it but then I realized it was Seth Godin. It’s not like him to turn so dramatically from a staple of the way our world works – industrial jobs. There is a misguided belief that has been running wild…
A Sense of Humor
A little humor goes a long way, a lot of humor can fall flat (believe me, I know from many experiments in the field). The answer can’t always be to have none and go with the buttoned up approach. People don’t purchase just a process or a result. They buy what a person they trust…
The Rule of Vowels
Choosing the right metrics to look at in your business can be done by following five simple rules: Actionable – The metric looks at something that can be improved over time. Explainable – The people measuring it should be able to quickly explain why it is being measured. Independent – There should not be more…
CRE Best Practices
It’s always a good day when a new first occurs. This week I had my first published article (as a co-author) in CoreNet’s The Leader publication titled “Corporate Real Estate Best Practices: A Methodology to Effectively Benchmark Performance”. Go check it out and hopefully enjoy! Be sure to read/subscribe to the entire publication, CoreNet is…
Moneyball
The Oakland A’s in the 1990s reinvented how to scout baseball players. In the world they previously occupied the only way to win had been to spend lots of money on brand name players and amass more power than other teams. It was a dollars and cents approach that small market teams could not compete…
Corporate (R)Evolution
The working world is changing rapidly. The rise of consumer technology, sustainable thinking by the general population, increased telecommuting and the decline of the traditional 9 to 5 workday are all leading toward a tipping point for the way businesses need to run their business. Traditional real estate services firms aren’t setup to move companies…
Minor Accomplishments
I started writing on this blog again on August 3rd. It’s been a solid month and a half with what I would call solid short term success. My goals have been to have a post a day Monday through Friday, try and find a writing style and voice to match my message, and to provoke…