Posted by: Peter Trollope, Business Development Director – Greater China & Korea, Project and Development Services
In the Facebook session yesterday I had the opportunity to hear the story behind the transformation of the Palo Alto Sun Microsystems campus into the current Facebook campus.
Frank Gehry called personally offering to design the campus to house 6,000 staff. It’s 4 city blocks in size, Gensler designed, based on recreating downtown Palo Alto in an unpopular industrial area.
Called the ‘big room’, the campus is totally open plan, with a green roof and extensive landscaping. Supporting a culture of ‘walk and talk’ is core to the design. They also have a BBQ shack, graffiti wall, barbers and dry cleaners, a road running through the spine and even a full scale garden incorporated onto a mezzanine level.
The design is remarkably functional; no curves or twists, no fuss, just a direct response to Facebook’s needs.
They use an awesomeness survey to gauge employee satisfaction. Real estate success is measured this way, they don’t do ‘metrics’ 
Peter
Loading ...
24 hours in and stocking up on business cards
March 27th, 2013I’ve just experienced my first 24 hours at the 2013 CoreNet Global Summit at the amazing Grand Hyatt in Shanghai. Last night the event kicked off with an opening ceremony and the well attended and thoroughly enjoyable Jones Lang LaSalle client event.
This morning’s key note speaker embodied China’s pride at hosting this event for the first time with a very well informed take on the world’s second largest economy. My first breakout session was about the relationship between suppliers and end-users in CRE – there were some very insightful thoughts on what a true client-vendor partnership should look like. At lunch, John Forrest hosted the Peer to Peer Roundtable Luncheon; I was the facilitator on my table, discussing Getting Stakeholders’ Buy-In in a Difficult Environment. We decided that having support and leadership from the C-suite is critical to ensuring buy-in within the entire organisation.
I’m looking forward to the next 24 hours, including of course the Networking Dinner tonight … with 500+ attendees, I’ll make sure I take plenty of business cards!
Darren
Posted in General comments, Shanghai 2013 | Leave a Comment »