By Jim Ware (with assistance from Paul Carder; also published as an article and blog post at The Future of Work…unlimited)
[Oxymoron (from the Greek ????????, “sharp dull”): a figure of speech that is self-contradictory. Common examples include “jumbo shrimp,” “living dead,” and “open secret.”]
(This is Part One of a two-part series on how facilities design and management affects business success.)
In my role as Global Research Director for Occupiers Journal Limited I am currently in the early stages of leading a research project focused on how large organizations structure and govern their facilities management activities.
We are exploring the current management practices, organizational structures, and performance metrics being used to ensure that workplaces and other facilities are meeting the needs of their occupants (for more detail about the project, see the overview of the GRID program on the Occupiers Journal Limited website, or send me a direct inquiry).
The study has given me an opportunity to explore the role that facilities management, or “FM,” plays in a broad range of organizations across several different industry sectors. To date the participants have all been U.S.-based companies, although most of them have global operations.

We will soon be including organizations based in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Australia, and Hong Kong. When the project is completed, in early June, we anticipate drawing on data from at least two-dozen large organizations across several continents.
While it is way too early to draw any conclusions, it is already becoming clear (in the U.S., at least) that for many senior executives FM is a purely operational function; they see its role as keeping the lights on, the air clean and comfortable, and the buildings safe and secure—and of course to deliver other basic services that keep the organization running. Longer-term planning and strategy responsibilities for facilities commonly reside within the Corporate Real Estate and/or Finance functions.
Yet several people I have spoken with have also pointed out that, as those who pay the most attention to workplace design, maintenance, and utilization, FM professionals have important knowledge and insights that should be influencing strategic thinking all the way up to the very top of the business.
After all, business strategy is about developing unique capabilities to serve a chosen marketplace or set of customers; strategy means doing things not just better, but differently, than competitors. It means reducing costs, increasing quality, and providing goods and/or services that customers can’t get anywhere else.
So the question is, can the management of facilities contribute to strategic business success? or are facilities just a “cost of doing business,” to be kept as minimal and as “invisible” as possible? One of the research interviewees commented that the only time facilities management got any attention in his organization was “when we screw up somehow.”
These issues have been rolling around in my head for several weeks as I have listened to senior FM professionals in many different organizations tell me that in their experience all those strategic needs are currently being dealt with by business unit senior executives, by Finance, by workforce strategists, by real estate portfolio managers, and by corporate real estate executives—but not by FM.
Remember, I have been asking these executives about what their current reality is, not what they think it should be.
These conversations reminded me several times of a comment made years ago by John W. Gardner, who during his career was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, a founder of Common Cause, the President of the Carnegie Corporation, a founder of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS), and the author of Excellence: Can we be equal and excellent too? (1961; link is to description on Amazon.com).
In Gardner’s words, in Excellence:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
For me, that perspective makes a good case for the central importance of facilities management in business strategy, especially when we think of how a well-managed facility can impact business success. An effective facility can:

reduce the cost of business operations;…