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Industry Experts on Dallas’ ‘Next Golden Age’

CEOs and real estate pros share their thoughts on development, corporate relocations, and what the future holds in North Texas.
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Photo by John McStravick, licensed under CC BY 2.0


C-Suite Perspectives on Real Estate


Calvin Carter, CEO of Bottle Rocket, and Ross Perot Jr., chairman of The Perot Cos. and Hillwood, were two of the panelists featured at a September event hosted by CoreNet Southwest at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. App developer Bottle Rocket is doubling the size of its headquarters by moving to new space in The Aberdeen along the Dallas North Tollway in Addison. Perot is developing a three-story, 200,000-square-foot corporate campus across from The Mansion on Turtle Creek. The new headquarters will consolidate his various companies all under one roof.


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Calvin Carter: “[The approach to design] began with a discussion of our values and how we could express those values in the physical work space. What we are trying to do is create an environment that is an expression of us emotionally. I know that’s very heady and out there, but that’s who we are. … Our company is very much about making things. We put our fingerprints on everything we do; we’re builders of things. So around our office you’ll find an area called the garage. It literally has a garage door that opens up with a concrete floor. We’re also all about working in public. Nearly every single wall is floor-to-ceiling whiteboard. It’s nearly impossible to find a place to hang a painting around our office, because everything is a whiteboard. There is also this mixture of work and life. We don’t live in a world anymore where you go to work at 9 and go head home at 5. It’s just a mixture of experiences. So we have a living room in the office, with soft features and furniture. We also have spaces where we can come together, large rooms with movable walls that pour out into the break room or pour out into the reception area, so when you come off the elevator you feel this energy. These are the types of things that you need when you’re trying to express physically what you want to have and the connections you want to make. … The setup in the new space will not be as extreme as free-addressing, where you show up every morning and check out a desk, but it’s definitely open-concept. To prepare for that, I moved out of my corner office in our current space into the open environment with the team. I think some employees didn’t think I’d last long. The first week was very eye-opening, in terms of really understanding some of the concerns and complaints that my staff had had about distractions—not just sound but visual distractions as well. We actually went back and made some changes to the plans for the new space because of it. … I started realizing I didn’t need a door for most conversations. I’m being more selective about what has to be said behind closed doors and what we can just talk about, to lean further into transparency throughout our organization. Without walls, things just become much more transparent. It’s freeing… What we’re betting on, at this point, is large open spaces teams on certain projects, but giving those teams privacy from one another. Many times you’ll see cross-team noise and distractions, but the teams themselves are on the same wavelength. One team may be in quiet time when another team is in noisy time, so separation of the teams became very important. … I don’t think there’s a situation where one size fits all. So what we’ve created is a buffet of space options, from the large team environment down to a cubby corner back up against the wall. That idea came from the time I started my business. I started the company in my house, and eventually I became bored with looking at myself. At that point in my business, I had no reason to be around other people. But I wanted to have that energy. So I went to Starbucks, and I would spend four or five or six or seven hours there. We’ll have a lot of areas like that, where you can go and be around other people but really have focus time for yourself. To sum it all up, if you can create an environment that truly connects people but yet is not distracting, that’s the ideal situation to have.”


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Ross Perot Jr.: “We have spent the past few years determining how to bring all of our companies together, from high end investments all the way to construction. They’re very different businesses with a very different focus day to day. The challenge is to put them in one building, with one corporate culture and with one brand, which is critical to everything we do. … We started by going around the country and looking at different corporate campuses. We learned a lot from Ray Hunt. He also put a lot of different companies into one building. And Ray made a good point. He said. ‘You’ve got to realize, you are going to spend most of your life in this place, and your associates are going to spend most of their working lives in this place. You have to make it really nice, really special.’ He said his goal was to build a building where associates would want to bring their family and friends on the weekends. So in our planning meetings we’ve asked, ‘Is this up to that standard?’ … Another company we benchmarked was Pixar. These are very creative people, developing animation. They all have private spaces to do their creative work. But what Steve [Jobs] said was, ‘I want everything they need in the core of the building.’ So there’s a “Main Street” at Pixar. That’s where the cafeteria is, the mail, a coffee bar—everything. It creates a walking culture and ensures that you’re collaborative and can’t just hide in your office, but you still have the ability to be private. So we designed our campus that way. … In Seattle, we benchmarked Amazon, and learned that one-third of associates bring their dog to work. That’s their culture. When I went to check in at Amazon, there was a bowl of what I thought were cookies at the front desk; but they were dog biscuits. On the West Coast, we learned about healthy building initiatives. Google is a phenomenally successful company, but you walk into the headquarters, and it looks like chaos. There’s no carpet, no paint—they stripped out anything that could have any type of detriment to your health. We’re not quite as extreme in our culture, but it showed me that there are thousands of ways to be successful. … Another thing we did was go to the Center for Brain Health to better understand how the mind works and learn about healthy mind habits—how do you maximize productivity and become very efficient? Most people want different work environments, so we provide those different environments within teams. We are very discriminate about how we run the business. If you live the culture and live the values and perform, we leave you alone. I’ve told the teams, ‘You want open office space? I don’t care. You want closed office space? I don’t care. You just commit to the values and perform,’ We’ve started going through all of the options, and I’ve noticed that within the Hillwood team, more of the leaders and associates are opting for a private office. They say the open space is far too cluttered and there’s too much noise. The Center for Brain Health will tell you if you’re deep in thought and are interrupted, it can take you four or five minutes to get back to that point in your mental process. The traders want the open space when the stock market is open, but when the markets are closed and they have to go think of new ideas, many of them go off to a private office. … Wellness is a critical part of our design and a critical part of our culture. If you work for Hillwood and you want to smoke, [your health insurance] is going to cost you an additional $500 a month. If you want healthy food, it’s subsidized. If you want unhealthy food, it’s market rate-plus. If you want a Coca-Cola in the new building, you’re going to spend some money. If you want a real cookie with real sugar, you’re going to spend some money. If you want a Snickers, that’s an expensive Snickers.”  

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