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“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Sun Tzu’s assertion in The Art of War 2,500 years ago is pretty apt in summing up the difficulty facing real estate companies today. Firms need tactics to get them through the immediate impact of the coronavirus crisis. But they can’t abandon long-term strategy completely, or they risk being ill-placed when the world returns to something like normality.
This is the paradox British Land Head of Strategy, Digital and Technology Sally Jones is wrestling with. Like all companies, the UK’s third biggest REIT is grappling with immediate challenges like retail tenants failing left, right and centre, and how it needs to manage office assets as people go back to work.
But the company is also trying to work out how the way we live is going to evolve over the longer term, and whether changes happening today will be sticky or fleeting. That influences the strategy over a time frame of years and decades, not months. But how to balance what are sometimes competing interests?
“We talk about it a lot, because it’s very easy to become tactical, but a company needs to have its brain in two places at once,” Jones told Bisnow via phone in the week that nonessential retail was allowed to open in the UK for the first time in three…
Read the full story here.
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