I had coffee this morning with an engineer who is going back to business school in order to segue into real estate development. This is a fairly typical journey. Lots of people come into development from a related discipline. In my case, it was architecture (even though I never practiced architecture). It was also the case when I went to Rotman that something like a third of the class had a background in some sort of science or engineering field.

However, one thing I did mention this morning was that he will likely find that he will need to unlearn certain things as he moves forward. Every discipline tends to indoctrinate us with a certain way of thinking about the world. Lawyers tend to be a certain way. Engineers tend to be a certain way. And architects tend to be a certain way.

In my case, I found that architecture school taught me to be, among other things, an intense perfectionist. The modus operandi in design studios is that your project is never ever complete. The more you work on it, the better it will become. And as a result, you should feel a deep onus to work on it as much as humanly possible. But in business, this isn't practical. In the vast majority of cases, speed over perfection will serve you better.

I believe wholeheartedly in multi-disciplinary backgrounds, and maybe this is one of the reasons why. It shows you what you should unlearn. What would you say your biases are?

The trend continues. BlackRock -- the world's largest asset manager with about 20,000 employees in more than 30 countries -- announced today that employees need to be in the office at least 4 days a week starting this September. This is an increase from the current 3 days a week.

You can't read the news today without seeing some sort of headline about the demise of downtowns. But what is clear from announcements like these is that we still have yet to reach an equilibrium. And it's probably just taking a lot longer than most people initially anticipated.

I know that this is a very divisive topic and that many of you think I'm old school for continuing to say this. But I fundamentally believe that there are irreplaceable benefits to in-person interactions among teams. I don't know, maybe it's because of my architecture background.

In architecture school you're expected to spend all of your time "working in studio." And even though you're often working and producing things on your own, you do it so that you can be around your peers, shout out questions when you need help, learn from their work, and go for burritos and beers together.

And it was such a fun and creative experience for me that I can't imagine what it would have been like had I been forced to work from my apartment. I probably would have had an equal number of burritos, but maybe a lot less beer?

Rapid and high-volume decision making are fundamental to real estate development.

In fact, it's hard to think of anything being more important when it comes to executing on a project. This is not to say that being thoughtful and doing remarkable work aren't important. You, of course, need to do those things as well. But it is to say that the benefits of moving as fast as you possibly can usually outweigh all else.

What this means is that any decision is often far better than no decision. Because no decision can grind everything to a halt. You need to maintain momentum and the way to do that is to make a lot of high-quality decisions.

As someone who was originally trained as an architect, this is something that I had to learn in the workplace. Because in architecture school, you're basically taught to work on your projects for as long as humanly possible and then, when you're done, you work on them some more. They'll never be good enough and you certainly haven't spent enough time "working in studio".

But in practice, you need to go. I would like to once again reiterate that this is not a license to do crappy work. I think the way to think about this is that speed and excellence reinforce each other. Our team always strives to do exceptional and remarkable work. And one of the ways to actually do that is by focusing on speed.