In this engaging mini-session moderated by Steven Binder (Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield) and presented by S. Wayne Peacock (Senior Vice President, Corporate Real Estate, USAA Real Estate Company) and Steve Morton (Senior Vice President, HOK), attendees were enthralled by USAA's new sustainable village complex located in Phoenix's North Valley growth corridor.

Central to the 500 acre, mixed-use campus are USAA's 232,000 square-foot, two-story office buildings. USAA's design goals for the complex were to create a campus that in itself would recruit and retain its 30,000 employees, boost employee productivity, remain flexible enough to meet current and future business needs, and create a sense of place-making and marking all while serving as good stewards of the land.

The result is a beautiful, award-winning, and LEED-certified campus that blends into the landscape while protecting the natural beauty and habitat of the desert Greenfield upon which it is built. Green initiatives and features include open spaces, floor to ceiling glass walls protected by shade awnings where needed, outdoor and indoor courtyards with water and tree shading elements, passive solar structures, the use of local sandstone in the building's exteriors, passive solar structures and daylight harvesting, advanced storm water management, water-conserving xeriscaping, and the protection and harvesting of indigenous plants.

The presenters imparted several key learnings of building green building to the attendees. At the end of the day, USAA finds that they are able to recruit or attract and retain quality employees with higher productivity rates and boosted employee satisfaction. They have experienced increased buy in and partnerships with local governments. The community is rewarded with long-term job creation, a more livable city with reduced commute time and pollution, and higher development standards. Last but not least, USAA has enjoyed many corporate rewards such as increased employee productivity, a strategic location, and long-range growth plan protection, access to a growing labor pool, and a magnificent recruitment tool. As one new employee put it “This is the in place!”

The ever-dynamic Dr. Nick Bontis led the attendees of today's mega-session on Knowledge as a Competitive Edge on a fast-talking, humorous, and fact-filled journey as he described what we need to do today to be prepared for tomorrow.

In the next quarter decade or sooner, codified information will double every 11 hours, our cities will be teeming with displaced workers from obsolete industries, and three-quarters of the Internet's content will be in non-English languages.

What can we do now to keep our competitive edge? First and foremost, we must learn to absorb information faster. The average person reads at 200 words per minute. Just imagine what we could learn if we trained ourselves to speed-read and process information at a rapid rate. As a reference point, Dr. Bontis informed the audience that Bill Clinton can read at 1200 words per minute and the world's record for triple algorithms is 25,000 words per minute with a 90 percent comprehension rate! Again, how do we get keep our competitive edge? As with any thing we are trying to master, practice makes perfect.

What does this information onslaught mean to our organizations and what can organizations do to absorb information faster? The answer is constant organizational analysis and strong knowledge management infrastructures. With a multiple perspective approach that engages human resources, technology, marketing, accounting, development, sales, strategy, and organizational behavior, organizations can stay ahead. Dr. Bontis provided the audience with numerous examples of how this translates to tremendous savings Ford reports saving $914 million from 1997 2000 due to knowledge management, Texas Instruments reports a $1 billion savings, and Chevron has saved $650 million since their program launched in 1991. On the flip side, the information technology analyst group IDC reports that Fortune 500 wasted $12 billion dollars in duplicate work.

Pundits everywhere agree that China's meteoric rise as an economic and geopolitical power is affecting businesses and economies around the globe. Is China a market for your products and services? A competitor? A potential partner for your firm? Or a threat?

“The answer is yes all of the above,” said Michael J. Enright, Sun Hung Kai Professor of Business Admnistration at the University of Hong Kong. “China's emergence will continue to be the world's most important economic story for the next two decades or more.”

Actually, China is merely reclaiming the leadership role it has held through the centuries, Enright said. China was the world's leading economy until the mid-19th century. Now China's economy is expected to surpass Germany's in size by 2008 and Japan's by 2015.

Anyone who's checked product labels lately knows that a huge, and growing, percentage of the world's manufactured goods come from China. In fact, China is now the world's No. 3 exporter, behind only the United States (No. 2) and Germany (No. 1). “Five thousand of Wal-Mart's 6,000 global suppliers are based in China,” Enright pointed out.

How dominant is China as an exporter to the United States? In some industries it's basically got a lock on the market. Ninety-five percent of Christmas decorations, 83 percent of toys and 80 percent of bicycles sold in the United States come from China. And exports to the United States for the first quarter of 2005 are up 36 percent over the previous year, he said.

But don't think China's manufacturing base is limited to plastic products and toys. “It's moving into more complex sectors,” Enright explained. “There are more industries, more vertical integration, and more local firms going international.” China is rapidly moving into industries that analysts once thought it would lose automobiles, for example.

Today China's skyrocketing growth is gobbling up unprecedented amounts of the world's resources. China is the world's top consumer of steel and iron ore and the No. 2 user of oil. Twenty-eight percent of all steel used in the world is used in China.

Consumer markets are booming. “China has more mobile phone subscribers than the U.S. has people,” Enright underscored. The domestic mortgage market, valued at just $2 billion in 1997, reached a whopping $142 billion just five years later.

Certain to create seismic change in China itself is a massive population shift. “Three hundred fifty million people will be coming off the farm, out of the rural areas, and into urban or suburban settings in the next 15 years,” Enright said. Regional disparities, energy and resource security, the financial system and the social impact of reform are areas of concern for China's economy, he added.

Still, China's economic prospects are good to excellent. “There really isn't much we can see that will derail China's growth, at least for the next decade,” Enright predicted.

Enright concluded his remarks by cautioning attendees that they must think about China in all its dimensions: market, production platform, competitor, complementor, investment location and investor. “You and your clients will be affected, even if you and they never go there or sell there,” he said.

Chris Lees of PISCES, the European partner of OSCRE, said it best during the session updating the push toward a common set of data and related standards for the corporate real estate (CRE) industry.

“I came here 5,000 miles from Yorkshire, England,” he told the audience of CRE, service provider, location and other executives. “This is really important.”

Six months ago, an update at the Toronto Global Summit showed OSCRE as a teenager beginning to sprout limbs. With this revisit, the youngster definitely has legs.

Speaking for the entire team involved in bringing up OSCRE, Lees offered: “It’s not an easy job, but it’s no longer an idea or concept. It’s an absolute tangible reality that you should be part of.”

Lees could easily back up his claim because an impressive list of OSCRE backers who form the global alliance for industry standards continues to grow, too. Starting with CoreNet Global as OSCRE’s founding organization in North America, other supporters with PICSES now include leading industry players like the National Association of Realtors, the Appraisal Institute, IFMA, BOMA, the Data Consortium, and RealComm. Plus, important corporate and public sector partners are coming on board as well. They include Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, GSA in the U.S. and Canada’s PWGSC, the U.S. Department of Defense, Jones Lang LaSalle, Trammell Crow, and Deloitte.

OSCRE Americas chair Ian Cameron anchored the panel, which reflected the spectrum of disciplines being integrated to create “information sharing across disparate platforms,” as he described the ongoing XML-based initiative. “Adoption is goal number one,” Cameron stressed.

With the growth and depth of the alliance, and the fact that some standards have already been successfully tested and are in place, the likelihood of industry-wide adoption is growing every day. There’s plenty of proof. OSCRE has taken existing standards from the Appraisal Institute and successfully converted them into the XML format needed to communicate across multiple platforms. And, CBRE is now deploying CIF technology in 74 markets globally. Both examples also validate OSCRE’s decision to use and adapt as many existing standards as possible instead of recreating them, a strategy that OSCRE director Andy Fuhrman believes will be critical to the overall success of the effort.

Fuhrman provided an update in the area of Commercial Information Exchanges during the panel discussion, saying that “CBRE and GSA are already there” in terms of actual deployment of standards allowing for an MLS-style of delivering transparent listings between owners, brokers and listing service providers. “There will be no more custom integration or scrubbing of imported data, which will lower costs and speed (cycle) time,” he predicted. He also projected that implemention of the Exchange standards are imminent, saying they will be online by the second quarter of 2006.

Riaan van Der Merwe reported on the Facilities Management (FM) side of OSCRE. Van Der Merwe, chief IT Architect for JLL, also predicted Q2 delivery next calendar year for OSCRE FM. “The global impact,” he said, “will be much lower costs to everyone involved.”

Metrics are also a key driver of OSCRE, as related by Bob Sawhill, Hewlett Packard’s Global IT project manager for Real Estate & Workplace Services. Echoing Fuhrman’s key point on OSCRE strategy, Sawhill also emphasized the approach to “leverage and align industry standards, not reinvent them.” The focus on metrics is one of the areas where existing standards are most readily available, he added, and OSCRE’s developers are placing that focus on space utilization over financial metrics. “It’s more about the actual versus planned use of space, not the square-foot per person, that really counts,” Sawhill observed. “What’s in it for HP?” he asked. “Benchmarking, and integrating productivity and system agility; these are the benefits. Long term, the benefits are no-brainers, you get data integration quicker, better, cheaper.”

OSCRE will also serve the investment side of the industry, and Richard Kozak provided the details on how. “With the rapid move to the global environment, OSCRE will address differences in currencies, languages, definitions and measures, with information flowing freely across international boundaries,” he envisioned.

“With 15-20 software applications that we currently have to extract data from, investment interests saw a need for standards,” reported Kozak, who is founding director of the Data Consortium and senior account executive with MRI (Intuit) Real Estate Solutions. “It’s all about finding any process that can be improved, and all about better return on investment.” OSCRE will shorten and enhance processes to improve income and increase value, the two key reasons investors get involved financing corporate and commercial real estate. “The possibilities are endless,” he concluded.