Editor’s Page
Required Reading
Jim Seneff is arguably the most vora- cious reader among anyone involved in commercial real estate in Florida at
present. His sense of history has served him
well in predicting past real estate cycles and
driving his CNL Financial Group Inc. into a
new global direction from its Orlando base.
As to why his company has been successful in past market downturns when others
haven’t, Seneff believes the answer is clear:
People don’t spend enough time reading
what they need to in order to make sense of
the world around them.
“A lot of executives are so tied into their BlackBerrys and to the tactical, up-to-the-minute stuff that they do not allow themselves to sit back and think about what’s
going on,” he says during part of an interview featured in this month’s cover story.
“It’s a crisis of the current cultural moment that we have people who are not thinking or reading, and that’s dangerous for democracy and capitalism.”
So many things demand our attention these days, and so much information is
easily picked up by logging on to one Web site or another. Real Estate Florida and
GlobeSt.com are increasingly tied to each other to get out the latest information
on commercial real estate, but we understand very well that you can’t get by simply on that bread alone.
I have met plenty of people statewide in commercial real estate who are ardent
readers, not only of our magazine but just about anything they can get their hands
on. Some have given me plenty of recommendations, whether for recreational
reading or to gain a broader understanding of a current business trend.
However, Seneff recommends reading beyond entertainment or education
purposes, including subjects such as science, math, philosophy and psychology.
If more people broadened their subject matter, he says, we might be able to find
a solution to the current market turmoil.
“People have a tendency to come up with unproven theories, such as taking the
hard sciences of math and imposing them on the soft sciences of markets, which
is how we got into this problem,” he says.
They used to tell us in elementary school that “reading is fundamental,” but
then we got so far away from that as cable TV boomed and the Internet began
competing for our time and attention. Maybe it’s time we logged out and switched
off for a while, find a good lamp and comfortable chair, and gather information
the way it used to be done.
For my part, I have a copy of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” that was a birthday gift from two months ago. Better start turning some pages.
Carl Cronan, Editor
ccronan@alm.com
RealEstateFlorida
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