Christian Whitaker, Global Head of Sustainable Operations at JLL
Christian Whitaker is Global Head of Sustainable Operations at JLL, a global real estate and investment management firm with operations in more than 80 countries. Before joining JLL in early 2022, Christian held senior energy and sustainability roles at Siemens, in the firm’s building technologies and smart infrastructure business units. Christian has a B.S. in Applied Science, Technology and Energy from James Madison University and an M.B.A. from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Watch the video Q&A, followed by an edited transcript:
How did you get started in sustainability and why did you choose this field?
I have to say, it was ingrained at an early age. My parents raised me in rural Virginia and they placed a really high value on environmental conservation. In fact, we grew our own food, we heated our home with a wood stove fueled with wood that was sustainably harvested from our land. They were always looking for ways to live more efficiently.
My father was actually an engineer, and he was always tinkering with things like solar thermal collectors and ways we could design the house more efficiently. I would watch him and I was always fascinated with how he could turn ideas into reality. It really inspired me, both around sustainability as well as engineering and technology.
So I ended up studying thermodynamics and environmental science, which set me up pretty well for a career in energy, renewable power and energy efficiency.
And I quickly moved into industrial energy efficiency, where I worked for a lot of large industrial power users. And as my career evolved I kind of started to migrate towards energy technology and building efficiency.
And that's really what has always stoked my interest: The technology side, using the technology to drive efficiency in buildings, and then of course the sustainable operations of buildings. So obviously that dovetailed pretty well with JLL.
But back to your original question: Why? For me, the “why” is pretty simple: I feel a moral and ethical obligation to use any talent and skill that I can muster to help advance our collective fight against climate change.
For those who are newer to commercial real estate, can you tell us more about JLL’s size and scope?
Absolutely. JLL is a professional services and investment management firm specializing in real estate. The firm helps owners, occupiers and investors buy, build, occupy and invest in a variety of assets – and across multiple segments.
We’re in the industrial, commercial, retail, hospitality and even residential space to an extent. By the numbers, JLL is a Fortune 500 company. Annual revenues are about $16.5 billion as of 2020.
We operate in over 80 countries with a global workforce of about 95,000 as of the end of our last fiscal year.
Can you tell us about your job as JLL’s Global Head of Sustainable Operations?
My primary responsibility is to grow and evolve our suite of sustainable operations services. So this includes helping to guide our technology strategy around sustainable operations of buildings – and really to ensure that JLL remains at the forefront of innovation and helping our corporate and investor clients achieve their sustainability goals.
And that's the case whether those goals are simple energy efficiency, water and waste utilization improvements for their buildings, all the way through full scale, lifecycle net-zero carbon program implementation.
What made you decide to take on this new position?
I had focused for many years on the technology side of commercial energy efficiency and energy optimization services in the built environment. So when JLL approached me about this new role, I really saw it as a great opportunity to bring my experience in the technology space to an organization that is really customer-centric, with a fantastic track record of customer-oriented solutions.
In particular for me, the ability to shape the future of commercial real estate operations – and look at it from a holistic, sustainability-oriented perspective – was really exciting. But I've got to be honest: What closed the deal for me was how Guy Grainger, who is our Global Head of Sustainability Services and ESG, laid out his vision for where he wants to take JLL over the next five years from a sustainability services standpoint.
And it really excited me. At that point, I knew this is where I wanted to be and where I could make the best contributions.
With property technologies being such a catalyst for change in the real estate sector right now, what proptech innovations are you most excited about?
Really great question. This is an area, obviously, I get pretty excited about. And there's so much innovation happening right now, to be honest with you, it's hard to pick any one application that I would say is the most exciting. But if I had to pick one that I’m most excited to see evolve, it is the application of applied machine learning in driving energy efficiency within buildings.
When you think about the way we design our buildings, we have digital controls in place, and traditionally, we can optimize those controls using very smart engineering programming logic.
But AI opens up the application to real-time learning about what's functioning and what isn't, and how to optimize those systems, which are very complex. This has to happen in real time and AI opens up that opportunity, so I’m really excited about the application of machine learning in that space.
To be specific: JLL recently acquired a company called Hank, which is a leader in using artificial intelligence to both diagnose problems within the building, but also optimize the control strategies in real time. This has a chance to be the biggest thing in building operations from an efficiency improvement standpoint since we moved from pneumatic controls to digital controls.
Are there any innovative technologies that aren’t on the market currently that you need or wish you had?
I don't know if there's any one technology that would fill a hole in the market that I see, per se, because I think there's so many out there.
But I do think when we talk about moving towards a net-zero carbon environment for buildings, you really have to start thinking outside the box when it comes to how we actually design buildings, and how we design the systems to heat, to cool, to light and to dehumidify these environments.
Traditional HVAC and lighting systems can be optimized – we just talked about a technology that can perform the optimization of an existing built system. But it really only gets you so far. When you're constrained by traditional design and construction methods and thinking, it really does limit where we can take buildings from a carbon performance standpoint.
And there are a ton of really smart people working on this problem, specifically around how do we rethink how buildings are designed. Ultimately, I think the integration of a lifecycle-oriented perspective is really going to drive new innovation and new ideas that get us closer to net-zero energy, net-zero water and net-zero waste.
So it's not any one technology, per se. I think it's more of an evolution in the way we think about building design.
From your prior work at Siemens on building technologies and smart infrastructure, and now in your current role at JLL, you must have really good visibility into the biggest challenges facing the real estate sector. What about climate and the real estate sector keeps you up at night?
There are so many challenges to address: Not the least of which, obviously, is this massive disruptive event we’ve all just lived through.
The pandemic forced a really rapid rethink of how we use our space, what it means to have an office, and the kinds of interactions that we want to occur in our workspaces. But sometimes these black-swan events kind of create positive disruption in our thinking.
For example: I think the pandemic has really forced companies to think strategically about what a flexible reentry and a hybrid work environment would look like. Thinking through how we actually utilize space has been, frankly, a needed step for organizations, when you think holistically about sustainability and the kind of spaces that we need and want, in order for our people to thrive in them.
But what keeps me up at night is that we're moving way too slow.
The technologies, the strategies, the optimization tools to reach our net-zero targets: They’re here. They exist today. So there's really no reason, no good reason, to be on the sidelines waiting.
My dad used to have a phrase that he would use: “Perfect is the enemy of progress.” I think a lot of people are waiting for perfect. They're waiting for someone to hand them one technological solution that's going to deliver the panacea of net-zero carbon.
The reality is that's never going to be the case.
Decarbonizing and driving sustainability to the built environment is a patchwork quilt of strategies, technologies, systems, design thinking and space optimization. You really need to be thinking holistically about how we pull that together, and I think people have been somewhat afraid to take the first step, because it looks complicated.
Frankly, that's where someone like JLL can really help organizations design those programs. Because we can show you pragmatically “this is what works, this is what will get you to the next step.”
You know: I’m sitting here in Virginia. It is currently 76 degrees outside and it happens to be my birthday.
I can tell you that I usually remember the weather on my birthday, and growing up, it was about 20 degrees every day on my birthday. And here we are today, and it’s 76 degrees on my birthday.
You asked me why we're doing this: It's because climate change is real. It's happening. We’re seeing it in real time.
So what keeps me up at night is that we're not doing enough, we're not doing it fast enough. And we're not seeing organizations make the commitments, or take the actions to reach the commitments that they have made publicly.
Who do you admire most in the field of real estate sustainability?
I think the people that I respect the most are the ones in the trenches today that are out there working: The facility managers, the sustainability and energy engineers, the certified energy managers who are doing the blocking and tackling of accomplishing these goals. They have my utmost respect.
But if I had to pick one person specifically, and it might be a stretch because it's not real-estate specific, I'm going to say my grandfather.
Dr. Maurice Provost was an entomologist, first with the U.S Army during World War II, and he later went on to found the Florida State Entomology Lab in Vero Beach. From the 1950s, when he established that lab, until his death, he really fought to bring attention to the impact of human infrastructure and development on the natural environment.
He was an early proponent of the nascent science of climate change in the 1960s.
And he thought to instill in my mother and her brothers and sisters the value of environmental conservation that she ultimately passed on to me.
He recognized the lasting impacts that we're putting on our natural environment, and he did so in a timeframe that not a lot of people were thinking about it. So I really admire the courage that he showed in advocating for environmental protection policies at a time when not very much thought was going into them.