Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

Each week, I select a few articles that rise above the fray and hopefully help you on your journey in the CRE world. They pull from one of four "corners:" corporate real estate, technology, management science and anything positive. I welcome your comments on these articles.

1. Coworking Firms Draw Tenants With Babysitting, Farm-to-Desk Dining

Long gone are the coworking days when it was enough to offer a cheap desk and maybe a beer keg.

At, for instance, The Wing, the coworking space designed for women, which will count at least 13 locations by year-end, members are offered showers, a roof deck, a beauty room, and even a recently-launched babysitting space called Little Wing that provides open play and story time for children and support groups for mothers. Now available in their Soho and West Hollywood locations, Little Wing will eventually be rolled out throughout the chain.

While these might seem extravagant for an office, they’re actually right in line with the sort of luxury amenities tenants can now expect from coworking spaces.

“When we were conceptualizing The Wing in the early days, one of the key considerations that was core to our business model was, ‘What are the things everyday working women need in order to be successful?’” said Zara Rahim, spokeswoman for The Wing. “Each of these experiences and parts of the physical space are answers to those questions.”

2. Co-working Operators Set for Expansion in the Southeast

The co-working sector continues to expand in the Southeast, piggybacking off the area’s job and population growth, according to industry sources.

“[Co-working space in the Southeast] is absolutely expected to continue to grow,” says Austin DuBois, assistant director of Workthere, an office space rental agency launched by real estate services firm Savills in 2017. “We are seeing more and more local and regional providers open their doors and we’re also seeing a lot of groups expand into new locations. So, the supply and demand are growing.”

As co-working’s dominant player WeWork prepares for its IPO filing, a recent Crain’s New York Business article argues that the deal will serve as a benchmark for the valuation of the entire co-working sector.

3. Why You Should Never Borrow Someone Else's Charging Cable

We've all been there. Your smartphone or tablet is low on power and you've left your charging cable at home. There's no harm in borrowing one from a fellow passenger in the airport departure lounge or from your hotel's front desk clerk, right?

In 2019, that would be a huge mistake, say cybersecurity experts.

“There are certain things in life that you just don't borrow,” says Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner and Head of X-Force Red at IBM Security. “If you were on a trip and realized you forgot to pack underwear, you wouldn't ask all your co-travelers if you could borrow their underwear. You'd go to a store and buy new underwear.”

Henderson runs a team of hackers that clients hire to break into their computer systems in order to expose vulnerabilities. Since cyberhackers have figured out how to implant charging cables with malware that can remotely hijack devices and computers, his team sometimes uses a trick to teach clients to be less trusting of third-party charging cables. “We might send somebody a swag iPhone cable in the mail. Maybe we have it branded as something innocuous, like a vendor or a partner that they have listed on their website. We send off the cable and see if the person plugs it in,” he says.

4. I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.

For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number.

We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member discount or at the pharmacy to pick up medication. When we sign up to use apps and websites, they often ask for our phone number to verify our identity.

This column will encourage a new exercise. Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk?

This question is crucial now that our primary phone numbers have shifted from landlines to mobile devices, our most intimate tools, which often live with us around the clock. Our mobile phone numbers have become permanently attached to us because we rarely change them, porting them from job to job and place to place.

5. Better Ways to Predict Who’s Going to Quit

Companies know that employee turnover is expensive and disruptive. And they know that retaining their best and brightest employees helps them not only save money but also preserve competitive advantages and protect intellectual capital.

Most retention efforts, however, rely on two retrospective tools. First, exit interviews are conducted to better understand why people chose to leave, though by this point, it is usually too late to keep them. Second, annual employee surveys are used to assess engagement. These survey results are later compared to people who left the organization, in the hopes that they will yield any relevant predictors of departures. The problem is that these data don’t give managers a real-time picture of who might be considering leaving.

Our latest research has focused on using big data and machine-learning algorithms to develop a turnover propensity index for individuals – a real-time indicator of who is likely thinking about quitting. We grounded the development of these predictive models in academic research on turnover and then conducted a series of studies.

Our results demonstrate that it is possible to develop indices that predict in real time the likelihood of a person to consider an outside offer and to eventually leave the firm.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

Ken Ashley