Rocky Mountain Institute and USGBC

This collection of organizations is working to make the case that sustainability is essential, critical but also profitable. The video clip on the site is a bit lengthy but well done. Its worth watching when you have ten minutes.

"The right blueprint can lead to the right ecological footprint, and so much more. From materials and construction to lighting, heating, and cooling, the building industry accounts for roughly 40 percent of all the energy used in the United States. Green building is good for the environment. And done the RMI way, it can also be good for the bottom line—everyone’s bottom line. As an international leader in sustainable design, we work with developers, architects, facility managers, and real-estate professionals to create high-performance buildings and communities that are less expensive to build (or retrofit), more profitable to operate, easier to lease, and healthier and more comfortable to occupy—plus, they boost worker productivity."

Click here to go to the site.

Leveraging Social Networking Apps

The August 6th issue of Business Week contained an article called: Fogeys Flock to Facebook. The article explores the trend of older users levering existing social networking applications. Facebook, which used to be the domain of college students is now drawing surprising numbers of professionals their 30s and 40s. Among Silicon Valley executives, journalists, and publicists, Facebook has become the place to see and be seen. And it's not just tech. Consulting company Ernst & Young's Facebook network boasts 16,000 members, while Citigroup's claims nearly 8,500.

My own encounter with Facebook happened just a few weeks ago, I had just completed an article on how Web 2.0 is both reflecting and fueling a major shift in culture. The article drips with words like participatory, customizable and creating community. While I was in my e-mail firing the piece to my editor, I received an invite to Facebook from a potential client in Nigeria. As I was feeling rather Web 2.0 fluent at that moment, I decided to sign up and take a few minutes to explore it.

When I looked up at the clock, an hour had flown by without my perceiving the passage of time. In a whooosh upon entering Facebook, I was connected with colleagues, past classmates, old friends, and gurus from my industry. It was a networking event, trip down memory lane, conversation with people I haven't spoken with in awhile and hello ping to people I'm geographically far from.

But what was really impressive wasn't the connection it provided, but the ability to visualize interconnection. Facebook provides a visual picture of social networks and how they connect to each other. In a glance you begin to understand who people are by who they connect with. The other interesting phenomena is that it fuels the already existing trend of the dissolution of walls between personal, professional and social lives. Add to that some very useful tools for mass-communication, event planning and the ability to easily swap posts and visuals, and you have just a few reasons why Facebook is adding 100,000 new users per day.

Now it makes sense!

Virtual Design and Construction (or BIM) is to Drafting...

What Digital Text is to Writing.

Think about the mindshift.

iPod 2001 - what a mindshift!

How is an xtreme building like an iPod? This was one of the exercises the mindshift team used to spur some lateral thinking about a new radical value proposition for delivering commercial real estate.

My 14 year old son sent this video clip showing the introduction of the first iPod. I've watched it four times listening to Steve Jobs set up the value proposition, compare and contrast what the iPod will provide against the current music experience.

Thanks Nathan, for sending the clip. It always pays to go to the source of a mindshift and experience it fresh. I hope this will help us think about the xtreme real estate in such compelling contrasts and motivate us to build something equally compelling.

"Little Green Lies" - Green Romance and Reality

The Blue Men are a mindshift both in message and delivery. Enjoy their take on planet earth as an intro for today's blog.

Green is in. With the momentum of an Oscar, a Nobel Peace prize and daily articles from all major media public awareness has reached that proverbial tipping point. The pendulum has now swung so that demand and expectations far exceed current capabilities.

The recent Businessweek Cover Story, "Little Green Lies," is an reminder that authenticity and transparency go hand in glove for those serious about restoring the planet. Corporations that jump onto the bandwagon will be closely examined to see if the talk matches the walk.

Here are some excerpts to the article.

"Barely a day goes by without a prominent corporation loudly announcing its latest green accomplishments: retailers retrofitting stores to cut energy consumption, utilities developing pristine wind power, major banks investing billions in clean energy. No matter what Al Gore's critics might say, there's no denying that the Nobel Prize winner's message has hit home. With rising consumer anxiety over global warming, businesses want to show that they're part of the solution, says Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ) who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder. "Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'"

"Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype. To make real progress, genuine accomplishments will have to be sorted out from feel-good gestures. Schendler no longer views business as capable of the dramatic change he thought possible eight years ago, the sort of change that corporations have grown accustomed to boasting about. His own employer is "a perfect example of why this won't work," he says. "We've had a chance to cherry-pick 50 projects and get them done. But even if every ski company could do what we did, we'd still be nowhere."

For the complete article link here. There is also a Podcast for the story behind the story. You will find a link at the beginning of the article.

If sources like The Economist and the AIA are correct there is somewhere between 33% - over 50% waste delivering conventional real estate. Most efforts to achieve sustainability or some level of LEED certification proceed under the old paradigm; a linear, hierarchical design-bid-build approach. Conventional wisdom says that any effort above LEED Gold requires an up front cost premium. The current premium estimate for LEED Platinum is somewhere between 5%-7%.

Unless I'm missing something, a new paradigm that can make a significant dent in the 33% - 50% waste will also be able to deliver a LEED Platinum building for the same cost (or less) as conventional unsustainable buildings.

Partnering on a project to achieve LEED Platinum with no upfront preimium sounds like a proof-of-concept test. What do you think?