The 20 August issue of Business Week has a series of articles on The Future of Work. On the surface, this may appear to be old news, that is, using the Internet, VOIP, IM, etc. to coordinate workers around the world. Any number of books have covered this topic. But this series of articles stresses the challenges embedded in this novel way of doing business. One of the key themes, in my view, is that coordinating global teams may lead to a loss in efficiency due to time zone differences, other (unknown) demands on worker time, etc.
Where I think these articles fall a bit short is that they are overwhelmingly focused on multinational companies such as IBM and Dow. Precious little space is devoted to entrepreneurs and small companies. Yet many of my clients struggle with these very issues, i.e., how to coordinate drug development teams in the US and India.
Regardless, I think these articles are worth a poolside read.
A Guide For Multinationals
For global corporations, the borderless world of Willy Chiu offers a glimpse of what's to come. International success once meant having bodies and factories on the ground from São Paulo to Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Coordinating their activities was a deliberately planned effort handled by headquarters.
The challenge now is to weld these vast, globally dispersed workforces into superfast, efficient organizations. Given the conflicting needs of multinational staff and the swiftly shifting nature of competition brought about by the Internet, that's an almost impossible task. And getting workers to collaborate instantly—not tomorrow or next week, but now—requires nothing less than a management revolution.
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