A friend of mine, Michael Kerrison, owns a Minneapolis-based management consulting firm called EnduranceAmerica whose offer is to help companies "create the organization that, if it existed, would put yours out of business."

Think about that. It's a powerful statement that Mike turns into a question and immediately gets his client's senior management teams thinking about what's missing from their organizations in a non-threatening way. His question asks them to project rather than analyze, devise rather than criticize. Hope rather than fear.

With the recent mergers in the real estate industry, a question like Mike's may well have real estate industry watchers scratching their heads. After all, these mergers are not creating organizations that put more power back in their client's hands; they are simply creating bigger entities. In an effort to improve the bottom line, these firms will have to reduce their headcount while trying to reassure their newly assimilated employees that all is well (and stable). It will be difficult to do this in light of mass defections and layoffs. And trust me, you'll see both.