Senior Leader of Corporate
Real Estate (SLCR) Series
A certificate program focused on the development of
essential leadership skills needed to drive strategies that create value.


SLCR Overview
SLCR Requirements
EDP Candidacy: Apply Now Online
Why Become a Candidate?
Candidacy Application (PDF for fax or mail)
SLCR 2007 Graduates
Register Now
2008 Global Schedule (PDF)
SLCR Seminar Listings & Descriptions
Change Leadership: Strategy, Implementation and Best Practices
Enterprise Program Management
Financial Leadership and Decision Making
Innovation at the Intersections (Partnering with HR and IT for Integrated Solutions)
Leadership and Strategic Planning
Leading Technology Issues for the Senior Corporate Real Estate Executive
Positioned for Success: Designing the Optimal Corporate Real Estate Organization
Project Finance and Capital Markets

The focus of this Series is on the development of critical leadership skills for those positioning themselves for a greater role in their organization. It is designed to broaden your business perspective, enhance your strategic approach to decision making, hone your financial analysis skills, and expand your leadership abilities.

The Series addresses the skills you will need to develop and drive strategies that create value and provide leadership in corporate real estate (CRE). The content emphasizes new capabilities, collaboration across corporate functions and service partners, integrated workforce strategies, understanding work and how the infrastructure can most effectively enable it, and skills to lead change initiatives.

Completion of the Series leads to a certificate recognizing you as a Senior Leader of Corporate Real Estate (SLCR). Each seminar provides continuing education credit for those who have obtained the MCR designation.

• Have 10 years experience in CRE, or
• Hold the MCR Designation, or
• Hold a position as head of a CRE department, or
• Lead a team that provides CRE services to senior CRE leadership

To earn the SLCR certificate, candidates must complete six seminars. Seminars may be taken without registering for candidacy. You must be a registered candidate to receive the certificate. There are no continuing education requirements to maintain the certificate.

To receive a certificate, you must register as a candidate using the EDP Candidacy Application Form. If desired, you may take the SLCR seminars without becoming a candidate.

SLCR Seminar Listings

The enterprise is under tremendous pressure to be competitive, resourceful, and profitable. The results of these pressures have made enterprises agile through constant change. Successful CRE leaders are able to anticipate and understand the impact of changes. They respond by having the experience in the development of training and change management material in the context of business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning implementations, organizational transformation, and the more traditional objectives of delivery, cost, workplace and real estate solutions.

Research shows that up to 70% of all organizational change initiatives fail to meet their objectives. Your ability to successfully lead organizational change is a specific leadership skill set and best practices that is a must in your management toolkit. Establishing a framework to manage change will provide an approach to ensure that the change is managed effectively

• Defining change and transition
• Choosing and defining what needs to change
• Establishing a sense of urgency for the change
• Understanding resistance to change
• Getting and managing political support

• How to develop a comprehensive change management strategy
• Organizing & leading a change implementation team
• Understanding why many change management efforts fail
• Developing a communications plan to gain business buy-in
• Assessing the critical success factors of change initiatives

• How to organize and lead the transition implementation team
• How to apply project management principles to change management
• How to execute a communications strategy, including stakeholder groups, message, audience, media, frequency
• Identifying the characteristics of successful change management
• Learning the skills of a successful change manager

• Learn how to develop a change management strategy
• Learn how to organize, lead and implement change management initiatives
• Learn to identify critical success factors and why change initiatives fail

• Those with responsibility for developing and implementing change initiatives throughout their enterprise
• Professionals required to deliver results-oriented performance through change leadership

Boston, Massachusetts, 30 July-1 August 2008

Program Management is receiving a great deal of attention in leading corporate real estate organizations. In responding to ever-increasing demands for change, leading-edge organizations have evolved the concept of Enterprise Program Management (EPM). EPM expands upon Program Management along three key dimensions:
• Stakeholder Integration: including sourcing strategies, internal cooperation and service alliances
• Lifecycle Integration: including project management, performance management, financial reporting and continuous improvement
• Project Integration; including standards, balanced scorecards and the use of new technologies

The adoption of Enterprise Program Management has led to dramatic operational gains by reducing costs and improving schedule and performance of major corporate programs. It has also accelerated corporate real estate's integration with other corporate functions. Senior leaders of corporate real estate are using Program Management to boost overall service delivery, drive standards and consistency, and improve overall cost. It is also being used at the enterprise level to create more effective links to IT, HR, Finance and other functional areas. Using Enterprise Program Management, corporate real estate is aligning with other corporate functions to jointly design and implement corporate infrastructure strategies, such as the agile workplace.

This seminar is for Senior Leaders who want to understand the benefits of Enterprise Program Management and apply the lessons learned to streamline their entire service delivery capability. It is also for those that want to push their organizations into further integration with other functions across the enterprise. The seminar provides an opportunity to learn what actions to take and how to build new capabilities. Upon completion of this seminar, participants will be better able to:
• Identify the value that Enterprise Program Management adds to your organization
• Identify which capabilities and techniques to build and how to build them
• Build upon the lessons learned by companies who have a history of successfully using Enterprise Program Management in corporate real estate
• Assess the opportunities for migrating to Enterprise Program Management in the future where corporate real estate is fully integrated into the rest of the enterprise

• Objectives
• Capabilities
• Organizational structure and alliances

• Stakeholder integration
• Lifecycle integration
• Enterprise-wide project integration

• Current state assessment
• Gap analysis and change plan

• Identify the value that Enterprise Program Management adds to your organization
• Identify which capabilities and techniques to build and how to build them
• Build upon the lessons learned by companies who have a history of successfully using Enterprise Program Management in corporate real estate
• Utilize a structured approach to program life-cycle management
• Assess the opportunities to use Enterprise Program Management to integrate more fully with the rest of the organization

• Corporate real estate executives who need to expand their ability to drive major initiatives within their - or their clients' - enterprise, while working more effectively with their organizational peers

Boston, Massachusetts, 30 July-1 August 2008

This seminar is focused on improving senior leadership skills in making financially oriented corporate real estate decisions and in persuading corporate executive management to support the recommendations being made. Approaches to directly connecting the corporate real estate portfolio performance to the corporate business model will be demonstrated, including tools and techniques to link specific real estate actions to key business model levers.

This seminar builds on the foundation concepts presented in the Portfolio Management and the Enterprise Alignment seminars. It also draws upon and integrates the often competing and conflicting finance and financial accounting concepts learned in the Corporate Real Estate Finance and Real Estate Transactions: Impact on Corporate Financial Statements seminars.

• Senior corporate real estate managers
• Senior corporate finance / treasury staff involved with supporting the corporate real estate function.

• Better able to work with and communicate with senior management and corporate finance staff
• Improved understanding of the corporate business model and how corporate real estate can support its success
• Strengthened ability to create financially valuable corporate real estate strategies
• Improved capability to develop business cases for recommending solutions to senior management about complex real estate finance decisions

Boston, Massachusetts, 30 July-1 August 2008

Technology breakthroughs, industry restructuring, and globalization are but three of the many forces that challenge the status quo for many corporations - and profoundly alter the demand equation for real estate, technology and labor. Corporations that succeed organize all of their resources to attract, retain, effectively deploy and improve the productivity of their work force; they remain agile, always aiming to lower the cost of doing business. In this environment, infrastructure professionals embrace a new mind set about their role and use new models to deliver the next generation of value for their enterprises.

This seminar explores how IT, HR, and CRE professionals - working with Finance and internal business units - partner to deliver innovative "next generation" solutions that no single function could deliver alone.

• Identify and build a business case for integration opportunities that eliminate redundant operations, improve processes, and align investments in support of specific stakeholder needs and requirements in new and innovative ways
• Develop a strategy to move toward more effective partnering, regardless of the starting point
• Understand priorities, culture, vocabulary, mindsets, and measures of success of IT and HR colleagues to communicate and partner more effectively and identify enterprise level synergies and solutions
• Ensure that the CRE gets a seat at the table with corporate executives as they focus on productivity and key infrastructure initiatives

• Position CRE as a key player, if not the leader, to develop innovative integrated strategies
• Organize and facilitate cross-functional teams for enterprise planning and project development
• Build organizational capability and individual skills to use and further develop strategies, process and methodologies that have been proven to be effective by leading corporations

• Learn how the integration of CRE, HR, IT, and other disciplines occurs in different ways, in different corporations, and may be formal or informal
• Understand that the movement toward integrated resource and infrastructure management is being dictated by profound changes in the nature of work and the underlying business environment
• This seminar challenges corporate real estate executives to seize the expanded opportunities before them

• Corporate real estate executives who want to be better enabled to deliver innovative, integrated "next generation" solutions
• Executives who want to enhance their organization's effectiveness by developing integrated resources strategies

Orlando, Florida, 8-9 November 2008

Senior corporate real estate executives must display leadership skills to ensure their strategic plan is successful and is aligned with the objectives of the enterprise's business units. Learning to identify marketplace strategic patterns, interpreting them and successfully transferring them to business goals is an acquired skill essential to one's success in real estate.

Leadership models, strategies and techniques to help position and market CRE services and create effective customer engagement are a key focus of this seminar. The focus of this highly interactive seminar is on the creation of processes that will forge an integrated infrastructure model within your enterprise. The key for CRE leadership is to anticipate and potentially drive a change in priority and to position strategy proactively.

• Infrastructure value proposition
• Business evolution and CRE impact
• Integrated infrastructure model
• CRE requirements
• Strategic planning process

• Goal and vision alignment
• Metrics & information management
• Scenario planning
• Developing an action plan
• Change management

• Learn the strategies that enable higher levels of business success
• Key leadership competencies are examined through current business case examples
• Develop competitive industry strategies and practices
• Refine your processes for developing management strategies
• Develop strategies and techniques to influence workplace productivity, and scenario planning

• Corporate real estate executives with overall responsibility for the creation of processes, strategies, scenario planning
• Senior Leaders charged with the management of real estate and related infrastructure staffs within their enterprise
• Senior managers with responsibility to mitigate capital risk across their enterprise

Leading Technology Issues for
the Senior Corporate Real Estate Executive
Success in corporate real estate will continue to be driven by advances in technology. It's not only the technology we use to manage our portfolios but also how technology is changing the way the employees we serve actually work. Companies around the world are investing in web-based tools to help them make sharper decisions, cut cycle times, do more with less and raise their profile in the companies they serve. The Leading Technology Issues class will give you up-to the minute insights into how technology will impact the space and services our industry delivers and how we deliver them. This course is of great value to any occupier of space and those who support them.

You'll learn through highly practical case examples and action-oriented tools how to position your organization to take best advantage of the new technologies. You will leave the seminar prepared to guide a corporate real estate department in how it uses technology to transform the ways it adds value to the company's bottom line. You will gain a better understanding, and be able to speak to, the business benefits of technology. This is a technology course for non-techies. You will leave with new insights, practical approaches, tool kits and actions you can implement at your company the day you return.

1. Ways to think about Technology in Corporate Real Estate
• Identifying leading technology issues - How technology impacts the space we deliver and how we deliver it
• Discovering the internal and external business drivers of change
• Explore the options for deploying technology in your company - What approach best meets the needs of your company at this time in its evolution
2. Practical tools and methodologies
• Practical case studies which include Cisco's Net Ready program, Sun Microsystems' technology roadmap and other leading edge cases
• Team exercises to road test the methodologies.
• Learn about: Integrated workplace Management Systems, point solutions, self developed tools, systems integration and outsourcing
• A method for building the components and roadmap for implementation
• Developing a technology enabled operating vision

• Better understanding of the business benefits of technology
• Clearer view of the external technology forces driving change at your company
• Greater ability to develop a consistent approach to real estate decision making and management across the company
• New skills for managing initiatives and implementing change
• Insights into how to build the business case for technology spending
• Understanding the importance of industry-wide process and data standardization

• Corporate real estate executives who want to be better able to assess, develop and implement technology strategies
• Executives who want to enhance their organization's effectiveness through improved decision support and business
• Service providers who want to provide the most value to their corporate partners

In today's tumultuous business environment, the challenge is to design a CRE organization that anticipates and accommodates both the disparate and fluid needs of the business units and the policies and agendas of corporate senior management. Successful CRE organizations manage the real estate as an asset class across the enterprise, while delivering space and services at appropriate levels - often throughout the world.

This highly interactive seminar examines the key issues, variables and success factors for designing a CRE organization that supports the strategic objectives of senior management while developing relationships and optimal solutions for business unit clients. Offshore client relationship management and service delivery are covered, as well as some of the recent trends in shared services and organizational change management. Current business cases will be examined to demonstrate various solutions to these challenges.

Opportunities to design and defend organizational models and processes given various business types ensure the discussions have a pragmatic, solutions-oriented focus. In addition to gaining a better understanding of the wholesale redesign of CRE organizations, seminar participants will take away practical tools and frameworks to enhance the effectiveness of their organizations.

• The external environment
• Corporate real estate & senior management
• Authority

• Relationship management
• Business drivers
• Performance metrics
• Process management

• Organizational structures
• Creating the right structures
• The people
• The change acceleration process

• Identify critical senior management interfaces within the corporate organizational structure
• Examine corporate real estate tasks and services delivered to the business unit, how they can be structured, and keys to successful performance
• Understand the four principal types of organization; how they compare and contrast by structure, job positions, and reporting
• New and innovative tools for CRE organizational and strategic assessment
• Best practices for organizational design and structure
• Increased ability to help managers and employees adjust to new organizational models including adaptation of new priorities, roles and skills

• Corporate Real Estate executives with responsibility for designing a CRE organization
• Those professionals who are interested in changing their organization from a functional to process-based organization

Orlando, Florida, 8-9 November 2008

This seminar is centered on financing and the financial impacts of materially significant CRE transactions. For acquisitions, this includes evaluation and comparison of different lease structures as well as ownership and debt financing. For dispositions this includes strategies for unwinding leaseholds and debt obligations. Financing alternatives for existing assets are also evaluated.

This seminar draws upon and integrates the concepts from the "Corporate Real Estate Finance" and "Real Estate Transactions: Impact on Corporate Financial Statements" seminars. Transactions are evaluated from competing and often conflicting viewpoints - finance and financial accounting.

The seminar draws heavily on concepts, insights and perspectives from two primary sectors of the capital markets - corporate and real estate, often presented by outside experts in the real estate capital markets. It concludes with a view toward making transaction structure recommendations to senior management, in the context of the corporation's primary financial drivers and objectives.

Attendees should have successfully completed both "Corporate Real Estate Finance" and "Real Estate Transactions: Impact on Corporate Financial Statements", have a finance-focused education (e.g. an MBA, Bachelor's degree in Finance) or significant financial analysis experience that provides a background to evaluate complex CRE transactions.

The seminar is targeted at senior CRE managers of large, publicly-traded corporations and senior corporate finance / treasury staff involved with evaluating and recommending transaction structures for large CRE transactions.

• Presentation and discussion of key Real Estate Capital Markets trends - current capital flows, investment return expectation, primary participants, impacts on lease rates, influence on alternative reuse
• Presentation and discussion of financing types and structures - various types of leases and sale-leasebacks, types of debt, other unique vehicles
• Evaluating and comparing large CRE acquisition transactions from a finance versus financial accounting perspective - i.e. lease versus lease, own versus lease, sale-lease/back versus capital lease versus bond lease
• Evaluating and comparing large CRE disposition transactions from a finance versus financial accounting perspective - i.e. lease buyouts, structured/phased sale to investors, sale with short-term lease/back
• Evaluating and comparing CRE refinancing transactions from a finance versus financial accounting perspective - i.e. replacing a synthetic lease with a capital lease or equity ownership, mortgage financing versus issuing corporate debt, converting a long-term operating lease into equity ownership

• Strengthened ability to analyze and evaluate financial structures for acquisition, disposition or financing of large corporate real estate assets
• Improved capacity to develop business cases for recommending solutions to senior management about complex real estate finance decisions
• Deeper understanding of the capital markets and their influence on large financial decisions
• Better able to work with and communicate with corporate finance staff