On the heels of the news that UBS is ditching suburban Stamford, CT to return to Manhattan:

Crain's Special Report: Corporate campuses in twilight

Like the disco ball, the regional shopping mall and the McMansion, the suburban corporate headquarters campus is losing its charm.

Remote, sprawling and splendidly isolated, such headquarters epitomized corporate America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Fleeing urban decay, companies like Motorola Inc., Allstate Corp. and Sears Roebuck & Co. built fortress-like complexes on the fringes of metropolitan Chicago. Jobs and residential development followed, fueling sprawl and congestion across the region.

Today, Sears Holdings Corp. and AT&T Inc. are looking to escape their compounds in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates. A shrunken Motorola has space to let in Schaumburg. Sara Lee Corp. eyes downtown office space after less than a decade in Downers Grove. Companies from Groupon Inc. to GE Capital hire thousands in Chicago while their suburban counterparts shed workers.

All reflect changes in the corporate mindset that spawned the campuses dotting outer suburbia. Empire-building CEOs from the 1970s through the 1990s craved not only cheap real estate but total control of their environments. They created self-contained corporate villages that cut off employees from outside influences.

As the 21st century enters its second decade, many companies are discovering the drawbacks of the isolation they sought. Hard-to-get-to headquarters limit the talent pool a company can draw on and feed a “not-invented-here” insularity that ignores major shifts in industries and markets.

Companies seeking to tap a broader talent pool and get into the flow of innovation are looking back to the urban core. Sara Lee is only the latest suburban company to seek a new headquarters in downtown Chicago. United Airlines made the move in the past decade, as did Navteq Corp. and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. Some of the most successful local companies of recent years, like Morningstar Inc. and Accretive Health Inc., never left the city.

“The whole corporate campus seems a little dated,” says Joe Mansueto, chairman and CEO of Morningstar, who moved the company's 1,100 headquarters workers across the Loop to a new office tower at 22 W. Washington St. two years ago without even considering a move to the suburbs. “We've always liked being in Chicago. It helps keep employees on the pulse of what's happening in our society. It keeps them current with cultural trends and possibly technological ones.”

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Motorola brought its headquarters to northwest suburban Schaumburg in 1976. The then-remote location reflected the company's aloof style, based on engineering prowess that produced the first cellular telephone. But after dominating the industry in the early 1990s, Motorola was slower than competitors like Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc. to see the potential in digital technologies that gave rise to the smartphone.

“They are an example of a company that thought they could do it all because they hired really smart people,” says Thomas Kuczmarski, president of Kuczmarski & Associates Inc., a Chicago-based management consulting firm. “They probably needed to be more focused on where the consumer was going.”

Sanjay Jha, CEO of one of the two companies Motorola was split into earlier this year, has acknowledged as much. His company, the cellular phone business Motorola Mobility Inc., will keep its headquarters in Libertyville but is hiring hundreds in Sunnyvale, Calif., near Google Inc.'s headquarters.

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Some companies that retain suburban headquarters establish downtown outposts to draw skilled younger workers, many of whom prefer to live and work in the city. Motorola opened a design center in 2003, in part to “attract hip, young designers,” a Motorola Mobility spokeswoman says. Likewise, drugstore giant Walgreen Co. has an office for its new e-commerce division downtown rather than at its Deerfield campus.

Last week, finance giant GE Capital announced plans to add 1,000 employees downtown in the next several years, almost doubling its workforce here, with some of those jobs coming from suburban offices.

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One of the biggest local companies to go public in recent years, hospital revenue consulting firm Accretive Health Inc., last year won a tax-increment financing subsidy and state incentives to build a processing and training operation at 231 S. LaSalle St. after considering sites in Albuquerque, N.M., Jacksonville, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn., according to the planning department's staff report.

Accretive pledged to hire 650 people for the facility over 10 years, in addition to maintaining a headquarters staff of 175 on North Michigan Avenue.

Sara Lee, which moved its headquarters to Downers Grove from Madison and Dearborn streets just six years ago, is considering a return. The foodmaker is shedding several divisions to focus on its North American meats business, which is scouting for about 150,000 square feet downtown, real estate sources say.

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If growing firms continue to opt for city locations, transportation planners need to focus less on suburban highways and more on getting people into and around an expanding central city business district.

“Your transportation investments ought to be driven by your desire to grow the economy, not to spread investment across the state as if it were peanut butter, which is what we do now,” says Frank Beal, executive director of Chicago-based Metropolis Strategies, a regional economic development group. “The global economy is changing in ways that demand higher densities that can only be serviced with transit.”

Former United Airlines chief Glenn Tilton said access to transit was key in the company's decision to leave its 1-million-square-foot campus in Elk Grove Township, which dates to 1961, and move its main operations facility and more than 2,500 workers to the former Sears Tower. United had moved its 350 headquarters staffers to 77 W. Wacker Drive in 2007.

At a press conference in August 2009 in the Willis Tower lobby, Mr. Tilton said 80% of the company's employees live within five miles of a Metra station.

Read more: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/artic...es-in-twilight
Sounds like Metro Detroit has a lot more work to do to become competitive. And it goes far beyond just cutting taxes...