EXECUTIVE FORUM

 

The Discipline of Virtual Teams

BY JON R. KATZENBACH AND DOUGLAS K. SMITH

“I have discovered another impact of the virtual team,” exclaimed a project coordinator of the “Gaia Project” (a disguised name). “It keeps me up all hours of the day and night!” In just over a year, the roughly three dozen people associated with the Gaia Project collaborated to set a time-to-market record for designing a new subsystem demanded by main players in the evolving global automotive markets. The effort spanned more than a dozen time zones, half a dozen languages, and four continents. Most, but not all, came from the same company, and there were a score or more specific functional, managerial, or other specialties. Different cultures, countries, ...

Get Effective Teams: Essentials from Leader to Leader now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.