Why Is My Life So Complicated? ... Quick. What's different about corporate real estate (CRE)? Well, according to Martha O'Mara, who teaches at Harvard's Design School, three factors differentiate CRE. Decisions are far more complex. Organizations are in a constant state of flux. And CRE's primary mission should be to deliver competitive advantage.

That's how O'Mara began her Roundtable at the PikeNet Forum, "Managing Corporate Real Estate to Support a Long-Term Business Strategy." Her provocative panel -- Paul Savastano at Sprint, Philip Pitruzzello at AOL Time Warner, Karen Pritchard at Fidelity, and George Bouris at Andersen -- focused on the Sprint case study prepared by John McMahan at Centerprise, and O'Mara wove into the discussion insights from her own corporate consulting.

As the case study notes, in November 2000 Sprint launched Project Evolution to transform its business model, based upon Cisco's "Net Readiness" strategy -- leadership, governance, competency and technology. Savastano showed a wonderful sequence of slides that graphically illustrated how Sprint is moving from discrete silos of responsibility to horizontal bands of responsibility for the entire real estate life cycle.

Here's an intriguing part of Sprint's solution: Encourage business units to self-service their needs. The idea is that by providing business units comprehensive information about their space usage and cost allocations, you enable them to bargain and barter among themselves. What a great concept. That's deregulation CRE style. ... If you would like to purchase all three case studies (Boston Properties, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Sprint) for $95, click here to order online.

--Peter Pike