The Healthy Workplace Nudge

Chapter 2The Rainbow in the Storm: Medical Science Meets Building Science

I think the key question is, how do we construct movements that are integral to the purpose and mission of the company, but that require a lot more participants than just the people within the company itself?

—John Hagel

Lew Horne saw the end coming. Soon after commercial real estate hit its peak in the summer of 2007, rising defaults signaled that a major bubble would soon burst. Nearly 16 months before Lehman Brothers collapsed and world economies spiraled into chaos, Lew's company, CBRE, the largest real estate company in the world, was already gripped by its own journey into the abyss. By January 2008, their stock had dropped 50%. When the carnage ended in February 2009, 92% of its value had been erased.

By 2010, CBRE showed signs of sustainable growth. But the world in which they operated had changed profoundly. Life would never be the same again. One lesson was clear to Lew: the old business model, the “art of the deal” that made brokers so independent and wealthy in the past, would no longer work in the new world of highly interconnected, volatile markets. Lew could see that CBRE needed a new business model, one that would leverage the collective wisdom confined within the company's silos.

Above all, he knew that the market “correction” was not simply a storm that CBRE weathered, but a sea change. It required a total rethinking of the industry. That rethinking would also require a new CBRE. CBRE's ...