TOMORROW’S LEADERS: Brockton Capital co-founder David Marks has said business needs to hear from young people to address a “generational misunderstanding.”
Speaking at EG’s Connecting Tomorrow’s Leaders conference, which aims to inspire young people in the industry, Marks said he told the youngest person in his office he wanted to learn his views on everything. The “very smart” but “very shy” employee, who was 23 or 24 was not contributing in internal meetings and when Marks asked him why he said: “What am I going to teach you?” Marks replied: “You don’t have any aspirations to own a car, you don’t have any aspirations to own a home, you’re happy to rent, you’re completely connected to social media. I want to hear everything about you because if there’s a general misunderstanding which there is at the moment it’s going to get worse and worse and worse and the solutions and the answers aren’t going to get addressed.”
Marks, who left Blackstone to set up Brockton Capital in 2005, said the achievement he has celebrated most (with a trip to the pub) was getting the first commitments to the fund, including a £30m investment from BT for eight years with the chance to make returns for the company’s pensioners.
Lee Polisano, founder of PLP Architecture, also said it was important to give young people the opportunity to voice their ideas in the industry. The architecture firm, which is based in London but has work in 25 countries, follows Polisano’s rule: “You draw my idea first and yours second. If yours is better, we’ll go for it.”
The panel of leaders who all contribute to getting development off the ground demonstrated the diverse range of careers available in property.
Network Rail principal development manager Kirsten Durie, who oversees a huge national property portfolio, said her role involves much more than operating the railway effectively. It is also about creating gateways to people’s towns and making returns for UK plc.
Chris Walters, head of development at London & Partners, said a large part of his role involves meeting international investors and explaining how the UK industry operates and how the planning system works.
Nick Dolezal, chair of Southwark Council’s planning committee, said one of the biggest challenges for the industry was that some schemes take a long time to come to fruition.
Anthony Mansfield, managing director for strategic land in the North at housebuilder Taylor Wimpey, said his worst work moment was arriving unprepared to a meeting with an aristocratic landowner. However, he said he was honest about not knowing as much as he should and managed to subsequently build a strong relationship with the landowner.
For Laura Wotton, operations manager at the Environment Agency, one of the biggest challenges of the role is to constantly challenge processes in place to create the best outcome.
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