I continue to be amazed by the unmet demand for real estate (development) education here in Canada.
Following yesterday’s post on the real estate development process, I received a few emails from readers asking about the best university programs (MBA, MRED, etc.) and the best approaches for becoming a developer.
I also had a good conversation on Twitter, which covered off some details that I had left out from my post (for simplicity) and which resulted in me suggesting that a real estate development school needs to be started here in Toronto:
@donnelly_b I’m game. The Donnelly-Hassan Institute for the Dark Arts.
— SymmetryDevelopments (@symmetrydevelop)
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@symmetrydevelop @donnelly_b would be your first student. damn! could’ve stayed in Toronto if there was a program.
— Kuok-Kei Hong (@KuokKei)
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Now, part of the reason things are the way that they are, I think, is because the real estate industry has been historically dominated by private rich families. People didn’t go to school to learn how to be developers. They learned by doing and that was then passed down to the next generation. All it took was chutzpah.
But as the real estate industry continues to institutionalize and become run by pension funds and large publicly traded companies, I think the point of entry will also become increasingly institutionalized. And that’s where dedicated real estate programs will continue to come in.
I’ve spoken to a few people at the Rotman School – where I did my MBA – and there doesn’t seem to be a huge interest in a dedicated program such as a Master of Real Estate Development (they already offer real estate courses). It’s more of a “longer term” strategy.
But I think that’s a mistake.
I’m confident there’s strong demand from the student side, so hopefully a wealthy donor will step forward to help make this happen. The University of Toronto has both a great business school and a great architecture school. That feels like a great recipe for a first-in-kind joint degree offering.
Image: Urban Learning (via Flickr)
Harvard Business Review recently published a conversation between Roger Martin – who is the former dean of the Rotman School – and Tim Brown – who is CEO of the global design firm IDEO. The title of the talk is “Capitalism Needs Design Thinking.” But I decided to call this post something else after reading Roger say this:
My friend Dan Pink argued in an HBR piece in 2004 that the MFA is the new MBA. I wrote to Dan to say that if that’s the case we have a problem because America pumps out a mere 1,500 MFAs a year versus 150,000 MBAs. Thirty MFAs per state per year is just a rounding error. This is one of the reasons I was so keen on transforming business education. It’s a huge infrastructure: 27% of all graduate students in America are in an MBA program. If they’re all being taught how to analyze things to death, that’s going to affect how they’ll shape the future of business.
But what this conversation is really about is the future of democratic capitalism, which is why I think it’s a nice tie-in to yesterday’s Architect This City post about startups and inequality.
I’m very worried about the fact that in America we’ve now gone 24 years without the median household income rising — it was the same in 2013 as it was in 1989. That’s unprecedented in American history. The longest that’s ever happened before is when it took just under 20 years to recover, after the Great Depression. This long period of stagnation has coincided with the top 1% of the economy doing spectacularly.
And so while it’s easy to point fingers at the tech community and say that it’s to blame for rising income inequality, the reality, I think, is that there are other more fundamental issues that need addressing. Roger and Tim believe that design thinking can help. Here’s another great snippet from the former:
I think the way that government generally works is to think, think, think, think, and then finally create legislation that brings about some change, and then they ignore their legislation and say okay, we’re finished with that. Then people go and figure out how to game that legislation, and the government doesn’t do anything about it. Whereas if they had a design view of it, they’d say when they passed a bill, that’s just the best idea we’ve got now, we have to go see how it works in practice, and then fix it. That’s just not the mentality.
Technology is having a profound impact on the world. And it’s something that is very visible. But part of the challenge is that governments aren’t keeping up. They are almost never out in front.
So when something new comes along, like Airbnb or Uber, the reaction is to just stop it. It doesn’t conform to the rules and regulations currently in place, and so it shouldn’t exist.
But as Roger and Tim point out, maybe we need to look at our rules and regulations as simply part of an iterative process (like designers do). Because if we did that, maybe we’d be better equipped to transfer the benefits of innovation over to society as a whole.
Image: HBR
I just finished reading Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. For those of you who may not be well-versed in the world of technology geeks, Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He was one of the founders of PayPal back in 1998 and was the first outside investor in Facebook in 2004. He invested $500,000 for a 10.2% stake in the company!
While the focus of the book is obviously on technology startups, it’s less about “here’s how you build a startup” (there is no formula) and more about “here’s how to think about the world, humanity, and the future of our civilization.” So even if you’re not a founder, or startup and technology enthusiast, I think you’d still find it really interesting.
As one example, Thiel makes the distinction early on in the book between what he calls “vertical or intensive progress” and “horizontal or extensive progress.” The specific example he gives is of typewriters and word processors. If you take one typewriter and figure out how to make 100 of them, you’ve made horizontal progress. However, if you’ve just replaced typewriters with word processors, you’ve made vertical progress.
In other words, vertical progress is doing new things and horizontal progress is just copying things that we know already work. In the grand scheme of the world, he argues that globalization is really just a form of horizontal progress. The rise of China is a result of them copying what has already worked in developed countries. But the true way to advance our economy and civilization is to not just copy – that’s easy – it’s to do, new, things.
That, of course, is a lot harder to do. But to build the future, you need to build things and do things that haven’t been done before.
Which is why Thiel actually gives $100,000 to a handful of college students every year so that they can drop-out and pursue a startup. In his mind, our education system is just perpetuating the status quo. MBAs move money around without creating anything new. Lawyers just preserve value and mitigate risk, also without creating anything new (Thiel is trained as a lawyer). And so he doesn’t believe that is the best way forward.
This may not sit right with many of you, but questioning the status quo is a prerequisite if you’re trying to do new things.