Seizing 'the Strategic Mindset'
Successfully reinventing the workplace also requires some substantial brain space realignments, IDRC speakers emphasized. O'Mara, for example, traced the striking changes in the corporate real estate mindset over the last 20 years.

"A market mindset," which largely measured facilities by market value, prevailed until the mid-1980s, she explained. That, O'Mara continued, gave way to the cash-centric "cost mindset," which lasted into the early 1990s (and, not at all coincidentally, made "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams a multimillionaire).

Though fairly recent, those orientations are as hopelessly outmoded as leisure suits, O'Mara said. Today's workplace demands "a strategic mindset," she asserted. "It's focused on the organization and figures out how to gain a competitive advantage. It provides a unique solution aligned with business strategy, and it factors in people and technology costs. It allocates place as a distinct and precious resource, and it enhances corporate culture."

But that strategic mindset faces its own set of internal obstacles, O'Mara allowed.

"First, companies often allow immediate needs to interfere with long-term planning," she explained. "There often is a lack of graduate-level or professional-level training. And corporate real estate professionals and organizations often operate under out-of-date mindsets."

Nonetheless, O'Mara insisted, "Corporate leaders need to get it. Place is expensive, so you must allocate it as a strategic resource."

Making Fixed Assets Flexible
Such obstacles notwithstanding, there's a lot of strategic "getting it" going on, IDRC's conference demonstrated. Some of the most promising strategies revolve around milking fixed real estate assets for every possible drop of precious flexibility.

Inside Bell South's three new centers, for example, "We've added a new issue: flexibility, flexibility, flexibility to location, location, location," Ackerman said. Not only can Bell South's new floor space be rapidly reconfigured, the technological infrastructure is also designed to flex with change. "New technology comes online every day for lower costs," Ackerman noted. "The 1996 U.S. Federal Communications Act, for example, mentions the Internet only twice, and both are parenthetical."

Robertson agreed, saying, "We have to get away from fixed solutions. We need space with fewer rules. If you have to have walls, have moveable walls."

Then there was the uber-flexibility championed by Wendt, who advised, "Don't own anything. Lease everything. Own intellectual capital instead."

Flexibility's significance was underscored by a case study on Capital One's fast-track travails. As employment quadrupled in only four years, Capital One's workplace grew crammed; worker satisfaction ratings began to sag.

So Capital One's real estate unit, working with HOK Consulting, created a flexibility spectrum, empowering work groups and individual workers to alter space to fit their needs. In addition, the team disabused senior management of the common conception of real estate as merely a "just-in-time resource." Instead, Capital One began carefully plotting workplace decisions with a "real estate play book" that integrates the efforts of real estate, human resources and information technology.

In short, Capital One's workplace reconnected with what Bill Yontz, vice president, real estate, calls "one of our company trademarks, [which] is that we're masters at mass customization in our corporate uses. Previously, our work environment was 180 degrees from our culture."

It's the Strategy, Stupid
Capital One's experience illustrated a point numerous Nashville speakers hammered home: Space must fit strategy, not vice-versa.

"We take the business plan and take it to the floor plan," explained Bruce Simoneaux, Steelcase market manager of field applications.

But making space fit strategy also requires an understanding of "soft issues" like employee culture, Simoneaux added. That was the case when Steelcase worked with Acxiom, a Little Rock, Ark.-based information management firm eager to attract unconventional, technology-steeped Gen Xers. So the project team, Simoneaux explained, designed a floor plan "that felt like a university student union."

Significantly, Acxiom's strategy reversed the conventional real estate order, where existing supply drives decision-making.

"You need demand -driven real estate decisions, not supply -driven decisions." O'Mara emphasized.

But gauging demand, O'Mara cautioned, is a much more exacting exercise than simply shoehorning the business into the existing portfolio. Demand assessments must reach far beyond obvious external factors. Workplace strategists must also track a broad, more elusive set of internal structural and cultural variables, including company structure, history, values, norms and attitudes, work processes, work-force demographics, and senior management preferences.

Demand-side real estate, in short, is damn demanding.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution," O'Mara said. "It will be partly judgment-based. But the strategy must start with business demand, not real estate supply."