Leadership and Execution... "Transactions make the world go round. Real estate services mostly revolve around a series of transactions." That's Mark Rose, the new CEO of Grubb & Ellis, speaking to me last Friday, his fourth day on the job.

As the smallest of the publicly listed diversified service providers, Grubb & Ellis (OTC BB:GBEL.OB) has a market capitalization of $73 million with revenues of $454 million. So I was curious about Rose's personal vision. Where does he want to take Grubb & Ellis?

Oops, wrong question. "Our best ideas lie within the organization. I want to reach out and build on what's here -- to learn, to over communicate. We should celebrate our culture." Development of a corporate strategy will be collaborative and take time. He estimated nine months.

But Rose did use two words to describe G&E in the future -- "decisive" and "nimble." G&E has an advantage as a "speedboat" in an industry of "aircraft carriers." Once agreed upon, strategy will not change from year to year.

G&E can "execute faster" because it can better navigate through changing constituencies of interest and implement new technology faster. As we finished the interview, I told Rose that listening to him reminded me of Bossidy and Charan's book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.

And afterwards I found this passage that reflected our conversation: "Leading for execution is not rocket science. It's very straightforward stuff. The main requirement is that you as a leader have to be deeply and passionately engaged in your organization and honest about its realities with others and yourself." Sounds like something Rose would say.

Corrections... to the last Dispatch (Mar 10). Freddy Lunt is the president of Princeton Property Management in Portland, OR, and this is the correct link to the Spring Garden Apartments.

--Peter Pike