CoreNet Global

Keynote speaker, Marcus Buckingham spent countless hours interviewing thousands of the most effective managers and leaders in the world today. He learned there is a significant link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, turnover, and customer satisfaction. He also found that great management and great leadership are very different skills, and he has identified the one controlling insight at the heart of each. He is the author of "First, Break All the Rules," "The One Thing You Need To Know," and his latest bestseller, "Now, Discover Your Strengths."

In his keynote speech, Buckingham urged the audience to find their own strengths and build their career around them. He said that most people were already in the right positions, but that they must work to customize those jobs to fit their strengths. Don't continue to do something you hate to do, just because you are good at it. In the end, if doing something you are good at makes you feel depleted, then it's a weakness. Do what you love and bring your strengths to the team.

California Secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing, Dale Bonner, welcomed CoreNet Global to Southern California at the beginning of the Opening General Session on Monday morning.

David Harris sent out a special "Thank You" to the California host committee for their tireless efforts to help make this a wonderful Summit for attendees. They are: Jason Anderson, Richard Dozier, Dave Freitas, Collette Hanna, Steve Hargis MCR, Mary Ingersoll, Brian McGowan, Michael Nuby, and Mary Jane Olhasso.

CoreNet Global CEO Prentice Knight had the honor of recognizing the winners of the 1st annual Industry Excellence Award. Nominations submitted in five categories: Strategy and Leadership, Asset Management, Workplace, Technology, and Service Delivery.

The panel of 5 judges who reviewed the submissions and selected the winners for 2008 were: Lynda Ward, Jones Lang LaSalle, Joel Ratekin, Ratekin Consulting, Chris Kane, BBC Property, Peter Fordyce, Principal, Group GSA, and Mike Webber, Microsoft Singapore.

Four winners were chosen from the large group of submissions. They are: Cushman & Wakefield for their Discovery Communications Platinum LEED Certification, accepted by Joseph Schechtel, Director, Global Client Solutions, Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.; Herman Miller for its Space Utilization Service – Reliable Measurement of Workspace Utilization, accepted by Debra Cesaro, IIDA, Workplace Professional Services Sr. Manager, Sales and Marketing, Herman Miller; Gensler / Hewlett Packard for their HP Workplace Transformation Global Design Guidelines, accepted by Gervais Tompkin, Principal, Gensler; and, Jones Lang LaSalle for the Motorola iWork Program Supported by Jones Lang LaSalle iPlan Tool, accepted by Lenny Beaudoin, Senior Vice President, Jones Lang LaSalle and Gillian Lunn, iWork Global Program Manager, Motorola.

Moderator: Thomas Kurtz, IV, MCR, SVP Corporate Workplace Executive, Bank of America
Speaker: Robyn Kaiser, Director Global Business Strategy, American Express
Leigh Stringer, VP, HOK Advance Strategies
Tiffany Bagley, Manager BlueWork, CB Richard Ellis

BlueWork - Great People, Smart Places. This is the brand of the high performance workplace at American Express, which ushers in a new chapter in real estate. BlueWork delivers a solution driven and customized, integrated program that enables work while retaining the AMEX culture in workplace delivery.

Beginning 10 years ago, the program began as an initiative to bring the organization out of offices and into an open plan. This meant a change in the portfolio, and a challenge to adjust to a change in space utilization and optimization. External and internal research was implemented, from which true opportunity developed. The growing and changing business required flexibility and a need for leveraging partnerships. Internally, HR and IT helped build the program, and externally a partnership with HOK, Nelson, Gensler and Deloitte built the program.

Included in the BlueWork program was a Program Guide. With the help of HOK, the program guide put structure around the program, provided an overview of the program, measures for success, and a business case for change. Also included was a toolkit, which took a complex idea and made it simple. Also utilized was external and internal research, showing a growing and changing business that required flexibility, a process for growth, training opportunities, and change management.

The program concluded with a video, illustrating visually the success of the BlueWork initiative and a lively question and answer session.

Moderator: Marc Heisterkamp, Manager, LEED®, U.S. Green Building Council
Speakers: Diane Priest, VP, Wachovia
Eleni Reed, Director of Sustainability Strategies, Cushman & Wakefield
Jefferson Thomas, Senior Design Manager, Marriott International

The optimal application of sustainability by multinational companies is across the global supply chain as a holistic, integrated set of practices, policies and products. LEADER Magazine's Industry Tracker defines it as "The New Uber-Sustainability."

The USGBC's Portfolio Program is a new LEED®-based pilot program is an example of it. As today's panel showed, the pilot provides cost-effective solutions to improve the environmental performance of a portfolio of real estate assets, as opposed to a one-building-at-a-time approach. This session updated the progress of the pilot program with experiences shared by representatives of participating organizations, including those represented on the panel but extending to a number of other enterprises represented in the audience by CBRE, Transwestern and Bank America.

Program moderator Marc Heisterkamp, Manager, LEED®, U.S. Green Building Council, described the pilot as a "framework for environmental impact," clearly implying the importance of reliably measuring and managing carbon emissions, waste, water usage and other key elements of the LEED mix.

Still, he cautioned, carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise globally, reminding the audience of a key finding from last year's joint study done by CoreNet Global with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI): the fact that commercials buildings account for up to 40% of the energy consumed in the U.S.

Addressing the basic tenet that sustainability is a broad set of practices across a wide spectrum, Marc said the LEED portfolio pilot emphasizes "how to grow a solution not just for corporate real estate (CRE) but the bigger picture, too."

"Volume certification" is the key term Marc laid out to frame the huge opportunity for CRE professionals to play a leadership role. The opportunity, as noted in 2007 by Dr. Amory Lovins of RMI, is well within the grasp of the CRE industry and centers on the huge stock of existing buildings in North America and beyond.

The concept is based on the application of individual buildings that are LEED rated being used across large parts of the real estate and workplace portfolio. But the challenge lies in the infusion of reliable performance metrics on a much broader scale for companies who are committed to reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, for example. The consistent use of green cleaning chemicals and practices serves as a simple illustration of how the pilot is being implemented.

"Volume certification requires rigor and credible scaling," and even brand credibility, he pointed out.

That's why it's noteworthy that the LEED portfolio pilot is focused across a spectrum of industry categories: higher education, corporations, retail, institutional investors and financial institutions.

Panelist Diane Priest, VP, Wachovia, represents one of those financial institutions. Wachovia is the fourth-largest bank in the U.S., so its portfolio offers a prime opportunity for meaningful impact.

Diane related that Wachovia's LEED portfolio focus is directed toward the retail branch side of the business, of which there are 300 under renovation and 150 being constructed currently. The branches average 4,000 square feet, again illustrating the broad potential impact of this portfolio approach. But it will also fuel the bank's strategic objective of achieving a 10% reduction in overall emissions by 2010 across the enterprise.

Wachovia is pursuing this goal by following four environmental principals based on:
• Protecting resources locally and globally
• Sustainable access
• Waste reduction
• Energy conservation

As Diane concluded, the big bottom line effect can be found in Wachovia's 3,400 financial centers and their LEED EB (existing building) certification.

Jefferson Thomas, Senior Design Manager, Marriott International, then articulated the hospitality giant's view of greening the portfolio. It's a wide-ranging line of hotel brand names and business lines stretching from Fairfield Inns to the Ritz Carlton, he explained.

Jefferson, who heads Marriott's internal Architectural Green and Construction Council, spoke of the importance of top-down support for going green inside the enterprise. At Marriott, he added, the Global Green Council consisting of the CEO and other C-Suite players sets the tone for important initiatives like taking the portfolio into LEED EB status. One factor making it more challenging is the fact that 80% of the hotel portfolio is franchised, which is akin to the challenge that occupiers face in going green in multi-tenant environments.

With more than 500 properties "in the pipeline" at this time, "the future of business is green" at Marriott, Jefferson said in describing the company's general philosophy or call to action.

That means influencing and responding to guests and employees around the world so that Marriott is at once learning from and teaching customers and staff about improving its best green practices.

"Hospitality management can be a positive force for the environment," he emphasized. "Our goal is to become waste-neutral across our existing and future operations."

With the Marriott version of the 3BL being "People, Prosperity and Planet," the hotelier is on the way to living up to its CEO-issued credo that "we're all guests on this planet."

Eleni Reed, Director of Sustainability Strategies, Cushman & Wakefield, followed with an overview of how this top-five global CRE service provider is approaching its lease-held portfolio of 221 offices in 58 countries. The C&W program scope is focused on corporate initiatives, client services, education and training.

"We are taking what C&W offers to clients and applying that inside our own company," Eleni reported. "We're also expanding (green) client services and growing this across regional lines" to enhance C&W's "environmental performance."

As part of this three-pronged approach, C&W has defined a firm-wide policy based on:
• Emissions inventory
• Site and building selection for leased locations
• Design and fit-out of those locations
• Use of environmental management/measurement systems
• Environmentally 'preferable' purchasing practices

C&W is broadening its work with clients to incorporate green building standards mainly by using LEED and Green Star rating systems in North America and Australia, respectively. In Europe, the focus is increasingly on ISO 14001 standards.

Examples include a new conference center in Mumbai that's LEED Silver certified. Another one is the award-winning Adobe Systems LEED EB retrofit of that company's San Jose office towers. The project is yielding a 121% ROI annually and won the 2007 Sustainable Leadership Award sponsored by CoreNet Global, AIA and IIDA.

So far, the plan appears to be gaining traction, Eleni said. With 86 properties currently registered for the challenging LEED EB certification, and with 26 clients and 25-million square feet of space involved, it looks like she and C&W are on point.

Moderator: Roy Cloudsdale, VP, Johnson Controls
Speaker: Charemon Tovar, Business Performance & Optimization Manager, Sprint Nextel
Brian Jordan, Director Transactions and Project Services, Sprint Nextel

Following a welcome and introduction from Roy Cloudsdale, Brian Jordan and Charemon Tovar gave an informative presentation on how Sprint Nextel has taken the dashboard to integrate key elements of analytics which give more value to reporting and data, allowing special information to be introduced that give the dashboard the capability to look at possible outcomes. While a dashboard generally is static and reports what has already happened, the new dashboard enables Sprint Nextel to do scenario modeling, proximity analysis, and predictive analytic optimization.

This next generation of dashboard is considered an early warning system. Using a system called Mosaic, the executive level dashboard can drill down to see where risk is and can flag and keep an eye on potential risks, while forecasting possible outcomes determined by the input of selected data and information. Using integration and this drill down capability, forecasting is a result of scenario modeling as it provides a look at potential future events to develop an optimized solution. Toggles on the dashboard show how different variables can affect a variety of results.

Transparency in the program enables collaboration and a mobility program. Everyone within Sprint Nextel can see how a project is being managed and keep track of the progress and the integration of the data, process and integration.

Moderator: Charles Barry, Senior Director, Sun Microsystems
Speaker: Dean Nelson, Director of Global Lab and Datacenter Design Services, Sun Microsystems

Tell Dean Nelson to "chill out," and the self-described geek will heat up with enthusiasm over Sun Microsystems' sustainable, ecologically friendly approach to redeveloping its data centers, starting with the development of the world's largest overhead cooling system.

Nelson, Sun's Director of Global Lab and Datacenter Design Services (GDS), is leading a 3+ year initiative to downsize the high-tech company's data centers, lower its energy use, and implement innovative cooling technologies as a key part of the reengineering process.

The focus is on reducing the tremendous levels of heat released by the powerful servers that drive the data centers, mainly through creative use of new cooling technology coupled with the compression, or smaller size, of the current and next generation of servers. But in a classic real estate sense, it's also about using less space and realizing the energy and other sustainable benefits that accrue through this practice.

Sun provides one of the engines to the so-called new "Age of Participation" characterized by huge technology platforms that drive various forms of social mass media like Google, Yahoo, Youtube.com, Linked In and Face Book.

But the reengineering of the technology supporting this new way of interaction and collaboration is also a major cultural change for Sun. It starts with the sense of entitlement that the company's data center managers associated with legacy systems that occupied far more space than the company's downsized footprint would allow for.

The drive to change data center environments has 3BL benefits like using less space, consuming less energy and reducing the carbon footprint. But in true corporate 3BL fashion, it's first and foremost a bottom-line imperative.

"It's the economics that drove the decision" to downsize, retool and otherwise consolidation data center operations at Sun, Dean emphasized. "Then we derive the ecological benefits and gains . . . We've gone from being the barrier to the enabler," Dean says.

If there's any doubt that the integrated effort is more a PR ploy, or a case of "green washing" as Dean describes it, his change model and the performance metrics behind this case dispel any notion of style prevailing over substance. So much that Sun has become a best practice example for suppliers and even the U.S. Department of Energy.

One of the hallmarks of the approach is that GDS, an IT-driven support center, is a key part of the Sun CRE and Workplace organization.

Like any CRE strategy or organizational model worth its salt, Sun's GDS is linked directly to the corporation's overarching global strategy. In this case, it's tied to Sun's broad environmental credo of "Innovate, Act and Share," to reflect its role supporting product development and transparency, or sharing of best practices across and outside the enterprise.

"It's all about supporting the portfolio, operating excellence and cost controls," Dean points out. From a data center view, the energy load demand of Sun's data centers is telling:
• 40 watts per square foot in 2003
• 120 watts in 2005
• 800 watts for the next generation of servers

There's a paradox surrounding the technology - energy curve, Dean offers. "Can we put more computing power in a smaller footprint? The answer is yes and no."

The reason, he says, is "there's a lot of compression, yes. But things are expanding so fast (the infrastructure driving social mass media and new products that pull from it) so that smaller sized equipment is taking more space."

The effect is that even Moore's Law of technology's progression of speed to process information is not sufficient to support social media.

On the one hand, you have Google, Facebook and other heavy-use data services. On the other hand, financial and consumer call centers offer examples of not using as much processing power as is available today. (Known as Red Shift vs. Blue Shift customers.)

"Both are really driving the market today," Dean surmises. "How do you plan for the CRE side of this?"

Another key fact Dean shared is that server rack densities are increasing:

"There's more computer power per watt," he observes. "Old racks now fit into a single blade."

It all adds up to mandate supported by senior management at Sun. "CRE and IT can no longer not work together," he stresses, adding that it's created a leadership role for CRE and GDS. "IT is now more dependent on CRE."

With 50% new data growth annually measured by Sun, Dean sees "costs increasing exponentially with today's power requirements."

A very key point is that by 2012, "Utility costs will be more than the life cycle cost of the equipment," Dean relates.

In a true integrator-style role, GDS "is bridging the gap between facilities and IT, saving tens of millions dollars a year" from a higher level of coordination and integration.

Dean outlined three key steps that empower CRE and GDA to play this role, giving him the muscle, in a sense, to get the internal clients to fall in line with the corporate mandates:
• Writing of standards
• Internal laboratory and data center design competency center
• Application of lab/data center competency center

But it takes more than muscle to leverage a transformation from IT space entitlement in an IT company. It takes a strong sense of elan, or a customer relationship management (CRM) style, too.

Dean's ability to embrace this so-called 'softer skill set,' makes him less of a geek and more of polished salesman.

By combining prescribed standards through a competency center with CRM skills to show internal clients that CRE is really a trusted advisor, not a policeman, Dean helped oversee an IT-space related portfolio shift to far less space occupied in the same style that his boss, panel moderator Charlie Barry, SLCR, drives the corporate-wide portfolio flexibility strategy of Sun.

He keyed on the corporation's drive to reduce costs. Sun's Santa Clara campus was a prime target intended to contribute to the C-Suite's prescribed 4% operating margin framing the 'less is more' approach.

Santa Clara Campus IT Transformation

• 6,000 empty seats spread around data centers
• Shed 1.8-million square feet in 12 months ending December, 2007
• Compress 202,000 square feet of data center space into less than 80,000 square feet
• $10-million invested in hardware/device replacement
• 88% space compression realized
• 61% utility cost reduction
• $9-million cost avoidance
• Completed in 3 months
• Removed 1% of Sun's total carbon footprint
• ROI in less than 3 years
• ROI in less than 1 year with cost avoidance factored in