Beyond occasionally reviewing leases and floor plans, senior managers in large companies rarely concern themselves with the intricacies of corporate real estate. Executives may not believe that they can have much impact on the “bricks and mortar” of their cost structure. They may also think, even as they strive to improve profits in other aspects of the business, that occupancy costs are either too insignificant to worry about, too technical to analyze, or too fixed to control.
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 1993 issue of Harvard Business Review.