(While rooting around for a commentator to speak on corporate responsibility, an announcement came in about JLL's position on CRO magazine's list of 100 Top Corporate Citizens. In the interest of disclosure, the firm ranked 95, but it was the only services firm to place at all. So we allowed Dyer a bit of bragging room when asked how he defines corporate responsibility. Fairly enough, he brags on the industry as well. However, only some 36% of the respondents to last week's Feedback Poll said their firms are corporately responsible. -Ed.)

We define corporate responsibility as how we as a company interact with the world around us in the broadest sense. We divide it up into a number of different categories, some of which we've been working on for some time and some we're developing at this point.

We've always been an ethical organization and place the requirement of our firm to behave with the highest standards as one of our essential cultural values. Another example would be our commitment to employing people in an equal opportunity way. Our commitment to a diverse workforce is standard in all countries around the world.

The final area we can analyze is the sustainability and the impact of what we do on the environmental front. So corporate responsibility is an amalgam of all of those ethical, behavioral issues.

A long time ago I was in manufacturing. Initially, when the rules about safety in the workplace and environmental behavior were tightened up, a lot of corporations were irritated by them. I took a different view, and that view applies to real estate as well. Leading the way as a responsible corporation is actually good business. The two go hand-in-glove, and it's becoming increasingly recognized that behaving responsibly as a corporation leads to respect and to being an attractive partner for clients to deal with and an attractive place for funds of all sorts to invest in. Good behavior is good business.

For example, in the area of the environment, how much real estate are you using and how much do you need? If you can use less real estate you're not only saving cost, which is good business, but you're also lowering the burden on the environment, which is good citizenship. If you can help a company reduce the amount of energy it's consuming, through more efficient use of air conditioners and lower-wattage bulbs and better use of water flowing into and out of buildings, all of those things are tightly linked to the use of real estate and its energy efficiency.

The real estate industry as a whole will make a big contribution to this area. When the ultimate consumer of real estate is interested it's going to impact advisors, developers and investors. The impact goes quickly up the real estate value chain.

Colin Dyer is CEO of Jones Lang LaSalle. The views expressed in this article are the author's own.