Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology

Teams are the key to smart, flexible, and cost-effective organizations for the 21st century. However, advances in communication technologies have dramatically changed the nature of teamwork. Traditional, collocated teams are now giving way to distributed cross-boundary virtual groups linked through relationships and technology, reaching across space, time, and organizational boundaries. In their fifth book, Virtual Teams, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, leading experts in networked organizations, take you beyond teams into the new world of work-at-a-distance, showing you how to effectively start, implement, and maintain virtual teams in your own organization.

Today, virtual teams are an established feature of multisite and global companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Bank of Boston, and Steelcase. Made possible by technologies like the Internet, intranets, and groupware, these teams are invaluable tools for organizations that need to bring together specialized groups of people to work on projects or comprise a spread-out business unit. The principles outlined in Virtual Teams provide an antidote to the high failure rate of teams. At the same time, as the authors warn, "It is harder for virtual teams to be successful than for traditional face-to-face teams. Misunderstandings are more likely to arise and more things are likely to go wrong."

In this straightforward guide, Lipnack and Stamps provide a comprehensive framework that makes virtual teams accessible and practical. Beginning with a brief overview of exactly what virtual teams are and how they work, the authors show how they can be integrated into your business structure. Featuring insightful case studies from Eastman Chemical Company, NCR, Tetra Pak, and Sun Microsystems, this stimulating and hands-on reference offers essential information on:

• The basic virtual team principles: people, purpose, links
• The skills and technologies necessary for creating a successful virtual team
• Supporting the dynamics of the cross-boundary team and enhancing personal communications electronically
• Virtual team applications of the Internet's newest offspring, intranets

Providing an in-depth look at an increasingly important teamwork tool, Virtual Teams gives you the materials you need to create and build a winning virtual team for your own organization.

"If you want to see where organizational communications are going in the future, heed what these pioneers have written today." —Howard Rheingold, Author of The Virtual Community and Founder of Electric Mind

"Lipnack and Stamps have written an important book for the 21st century corporation." —Regis McKenna, The McKenna Group, author of Relationship Marketing

"This book provides a long overdue perspective on how to apply the discipline of real teams in the fast moving, increasingly dispersed information age of the future." —Jon R. Katzenbach, Author, The Wisdom of Teams

"For those who want to lead the movement, catch up with it, or simply know where it is going, this book is packed with useful information and interesting stories." —Dee W. Hock, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, VISA

"Virtual Teams provides valuable insights into global teamwork and management through network technologies now available to all companies, large or small." —Jim Lynch, Director, Corporate Quality, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

JESSICA LIPNACK and JEFFREY STAMPS are the President and Cofounder, respectively, of The Networking Institute, a consulting and publishing company specializing in organizational networks. TNI has worked with Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review, the UN, KPMG Peat Marwick, MIT, and Hyatt Hotels.