Cambridge Business Association
Global Teams
Book

Global Teams

How the Best Teams Achieve High Performance

Jo Owen
FT Press, 2016
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Applicable
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

To succeed at globalization, businesses need efficient teams operating at their peak worldwide. Global teams struggle with geography, time differences, and cultural and linguistic barriers. Their companies often must reconcile these teams’ divergent worldwide and local or national goals. Leadership expert Jo Owen explains that while senior executives tend to see global goals as paramount, team members also face local and national priorities. Owen’s fascinating and quite specific manual, while somewhat repetitive, includes a wealth of relevant details. getAbstract recommends his useful handbook to senior managers and global team leaders.

Summary

To succeed in a globalized company, managers must create and lead efficient teams that operate at their peak worldwide. In the past, common managerial wisdom in the West promoted adopting Western management practices everywhere as the road to globalization. The emergence of Japan as a leading economic power invalidated this idea. Now, with the growth of China and India, managers must confront distinctly different local ways of doing things and still achieve their international corporate goals.

Managing a team with members in multiple locations across the world also differs unequivocally from managing a domestic or local team, or a team based entirely in one overseas locale. Scattered global teams must struggle with geographic and time differences, as well as bridging cultural and linguistic barriers.

Managers can find communication difficult even with a domestic team, whose members might not understand you all the time. However, working with each member in person allows leaders to gauge every employee’s level of understanding and resolve any differences.

With a spread-out global team, variations in culture and distances can make communication extremely difficult...

About the Author

Jo Owen is the award-winning author of 15 books, an entrepreneur and a frequent speaker on leadership. He built and led firms in Japan, Europe and North America. For this book, he worked with and researched more than 100 of the best organizations – and one or two of the worst.   

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