Bill Shireman, President and CEO, Global Futures, recently teamed up with Mitsubishi Motors to combat protesters who were outraged that the car and electric company used practices that endanger the rainforest. In order to create a positive image between the company and rain forest activists, Shireman and his team created a policy that Mitsubishi Motors would no longer use paper or wood products that came from the rainforest. This policy not only created a positive relationship between the company and the activist but set a standard for paper use among other related companies. Mitsubishi Motors ended up soling their initial concern and created a more positive perception among a larger group of stakeholders.

Since today’s companies serve not just shareholders but an increasing number are stakeholders, the triple bottom line has become more and more important. The overlap of the bottom lines, economic growth, socio-economics and socio-enviornments create sustainability.

Companies may initially ask what will sustainability do for my company? Sustainability has tactical advantages such as efficiency and innovation and strategic advantages like brand alignment, consumer preference and a social license to operate. The payoffs have created regulatory advantages for General Motors and Toyota.

• Assessment of current practices: Invite the companies’ five business functions to join you to look at LEEDS, FTSE4 Good and Smart Growth. Make sure to include environmental and public affairs executives
• Create an executive report card
• Planning Intensive: Begin to align your sustainability goals with overall business strategy. Consider how the company can gain esteem with stakeholders
• Issue the report
• Engage stakeholders

The big picture is knowledge. “Knowledge is the fundamental resource that allows companies and stakeholders to stretch the lines to create a lifelong resource,” Shireman said. This in turn allows for the stretching of our material goods, creating more sustainability.

At Tuesday's luncheon at the Toronto Summit, CoreNet Global awarded its prestigious Economic Development Leadership and Accomplishment Awards recognize leadership, best practices, and innovation in Economic Development. The 2005 awards were sponsored by Stadmauer, Bailkin, Biggins Economic Development Incentives Advisors. From the twelve finalists, the following four organizations were awarded in two categories.

• City of Farmer's Branch, Texas
• Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development

• Piedmont Triad, North Carolina, Partnership
• San Antonio, Texas, Economic Development Foundation

Frank Robinson of McKesson, Ed Noha of Jones Lang LaSalle, and CoreNet Global Chief Learning Officer Prentice Knight, paid tribute to recently retired Chief Learning Officer, H. Bruce Russell, honoring him for his long career in corporate real estate and for his leadership in promoting research and education efforts in CoreNet Global. The prestigious Global Innovator's Awards have been renamed in Russell's honor to the H. Bruce Russell Global Innovator's Award.

"To manage it, you have to measure it," underscored moderator Mark Bell MCR, Workplace Consultant, Capital One, in introducing Tuesday afternoon's breakout session on benchmarking and its role in corporate real estate (CRE) management. The session was filled to capacity with attendees eager to hear the latest thinking on the crucial topic.

Featured in the session was a detailed look at CRE benchmarking activities at Sovereign Bank, led by Karen Ellzey, Principal and Director of Consulting Services, Trammell Crow Company, and Michael Kline, Alliance Director at Sovereign Bank, Trammell Crow Company.

Sovereign Bank, a $48 billion institution, has a 4.9 million-sq.-ft. portfolio located primarily in the northeastern United States. "So our benchmarking is focused on the Northeast, and it's focused on banks," Kline said.

• Good can be the enemy of great
• You must employ a systematic, rigorous approach
• Internal year-on-year benchmarks may be more significant than external benchmarks
• Alternative workplace concepts are changing the benchmarking paradigm
• Make sure you don't benchmark against old news

To do effective benchmarking, Ellzey said, you need a mindset that's continually looking ahead. "You shouldn't try to use benchmarking to get you off the hook from asking the question of whether you can do even better," she urged.

Panelist Tim Burton, Vice President of Real Estate at CIGNA Corp., offered some of his own benchmarking insights. "Don't let benchmarking projects become overly complicated," he said. "That's one of the biggest pitfalls. And sometimes benchmarking can become an end unto itself. But you have to remember that benchmarking is a tool."

If the audience of more than 50 real estate, technology and standards executives who showed up to hear about sorely-lacking industry standards is any indication, the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate is moving from infancy to adolescence.

The panel of six business process-minded experts profiled OSCRE's rapidly expanding family of industry alliance partners that started with CoreNet Global two years ago. In that time, the addition of BOMA, IFMA, NACREIF, NAR, NAIOP and most recently the Appraisal Institute signals the emergence of the broad industry alliance envisioned by the CoreNet Global board when it spawned OSCRE in 2003.

With the resulting spinoff of OSCRE last year to a self-standing non-profit entity, the stage was set for the full development of an open , non-proprietary platform to host a comprehensive set of industry standards globally. Keith Perske, one of the OSCRE co-founders and board members, likens the vision of achieving total interoperability regardless of location anywhere in the world to boiling the ocean. The panel he joined in Toronto senses OSCRE's water temperature is rising.

Young OSCRE's sudden growth spurt is being fed by UK-based PISCES (an allied standards group based in London) and the Appraisal Institute, which have announced their intention to share their existing standards with OSCRE - whose designers will convert the data sets into the XML format specified to drive the system.

Panelist Bruce Kellogg, the Appraisal Institute's president, noted, "This is a great opportunity to interact with corporate real estate executives and the accounting profession in terms of valuation standards." The Institute is promoting the FASB's recommendation for companies in North America to adopt fair market valuation standards - as already seen in the European Union.

"Harmonizing - we're the only ones doing this,"OSCRE Americas Chairman Ian Cameron offered. He indicated the first set of standards should be ready within six months."We're taking the existing bodies of work forward, communicating the vision" while executing the rest of the ambitious agenda to see OSCRE grow up.

Cameron, who moderated the Toronto panel, offered a case study to illustrate the critical path to total success. He opened the information-packed program by looking at a single lease scenario that identifies 16 stakeholders involved in an electronic RFP. The case illustrates the ways in which each stakeholder - including brokers, accountants, appraisers, bankers, financiers, tech companies, owners, tenant, consultants and more - would pull information from a unified OSCRE platform to be built on open architecture and that would lend itself to easier systems integration, build a new metrics infrastructure, and link work flows - among a range of other funcationalities.

For Perske, who also serves as Manager of Global Systems, Workplace Resources, for Sun Microsystems, OSCRE is a way to integrate information from multiple sources, giving him the ability to present management information more readily in an upward and lateral direction at the same time. "OSCRE will lead to better reporting and better decisions, along with lower tech costs."

But as Perske analogized, all of this integration, cross-communication and harmonization is like boiling the ocean. It will take more time. Peter Linkletter of the Public Works and Government Services Canada - the country's counterpart to the GSA in the US - thinks that the public sector can help. Like the Appraisal Institute and PICES' existing standards, Canadian and American federal agencies have a lot to contribute to the consortium. Taking part in OSCRE's space metrics category, Linkletter said that the task of unifying 24 different functions that would define OSCRE's total essence is a considerable undertaking. "Is this ERP thing a fad or for real," he quipped from the panel. "We see standards as being really essential to streamlining processes, and we are beginning to get the right information to achieve this."

Indeed, where his friends at the GSA are concerned - and there were more than several in the audience - the recent Executive Order to streamline and standardize the massive federal property portfolio offers a convenient window of opportunity to again harmonize with OSCRE. The touch point is the Federal Real Property Council, where the push to align all government property and workplace management metrics and operations is already moving ahead.

Tech companies' buy-in is obviously another critical aspect of this multi-faceted initiative. Addressing all of the executives in attendance at the panel, OSCRE business manager Andy Furman implored, "We need all of you to push and support this effort for you, vendors and others to get involved in OSCRE." Success would be the integration of an OSCRE "bug" within the operating systems of Microsoft, Autodesk, and many other software developers in attendance, Furman stated.

Another critical buy-in is needed. It needs to come from the corporate end users within CoreNet Global and NACREIF, according to Kellogg of the Appraisal Institute. Advocates from these two groups are best positioned to help overcome the concern that proprietary, close-ended interests will prevail. "This represents a huge drive to be an open source versus the concerns that proprietary systems will continue on," concluded Sun's Perske.

But as Nancy Sandquist, adjunct professor at the University of San Diego's Graduate School of Business, said, quoting real estate IT expert and Gartner Group consultant Mike Bell's warning to software vendors: "Ignore OSCRE at your own peril!"

Wait 'til he's a teenager.

– Richard Kadzis