Today's speaker was Morgan Dene Oliver who is a CEO of OliverMcMillan, a real estate development and management firm. While his projector was getting fixed, he started by doing some show-of-hands about who in the audience:
1. believes "Art and Design" are essential for their future success ? (Many hands went up)
2. believes they are left brained ? (some - much less that I anticipated)
3. believes that people can use both left and right side of their brain ? (Huh ? almost all hands)

Then he offered some introduction about the left and right brain functions and recommended a book by Daniel Pink: A Whole New Mind which talks about how your right brain is going to help you achieve differentiation. Morgan also mentioned that Creativity, Tenacity as very important values for entrepreneurs. "You can always find someone who is more brilliant than you, but not someone who is more creative than you". With this theme, the presentation started. On the showcase were several of the stunningly beautiful and familiar buildings in La Jolla, UTC, Downtown area. He touched upon how they started to introduce complete community-in-a-building feeling to all their development, the importance of location for real-estate (I have yet to see any real-estate guy not utter location-location-location phrase in any talk), strategically buying properties in downturn and also some of the mistakes that they made and some of the unfortunate bad timings. Someone asked about Green Buildings (eco friendly) in San Diego downtown and his answer was that this was no longer a fad, but a requirement. Also mentioned about supporting the art tax bill from all commercial development. Had an interesting advice for real estate locations - buy properties near art galleries, gay communities!

Date: Nov/02/07