Leading Global Project Teams: The New Leadership Challenge

Globalization is more than simply off-shoring work or establishing government programs aimed at expanding trade. Pressures from emerging markets, converging markets, technology advances, customer demands, and resource availability have stimulated globalization as a strategy to improve business results. Globalization strategy, however, is worthless without effective execution in a globally distributed team environment. Based on the authors' personal experience and best practice research of leading global companies, Leading Global Project Teams: The New Leadership Challenge looks at effective global team leadership from a holistic perspective. Martinelli, Rahschulte, and Waddell show that globalization strategy and global execution must be tightly aligned. This means that global product and service development success is not the work of just one leader, but of many working as a collective, collaborative team that happens to be separated by distance, time, culture, and organizational position. This book answers the question "How does one effectively lead highly-distributed global teams to achieve the improved business results needed to compete in today's market?" by focusing on the responsibilities of the collective team - from senior managers, to project managers, to individuals who make up our globally distributed teams.