Picture this. You run a conference, a big one. The people who attend your conference represent organizations that collectively manage trillions of dollars in assets, money that supports retirees no less. They come to your event for insight into what they should and should not do, but they won't get much out of that experience unless they can trust each other with what's going well and what's going poorly across massive portfolios.

You shape the environment where all of this happens. So what are you gonna do? How do you handle that? Fortunately, your name is Zoe Hughes. And you have earned a lot of people's trust. Zoe is CEO of the Pension Real Estate Association, or PREA for short. She is not an investment professional. Her early career was actually in journalism, which makes sense, because she studies people: how they learn, when and why  ...