Global teams are now officially the way of things. Everything about such projects or operations is more difficult than face-toface teams – including figuring out how to declare victory when failure is what actually happened. What’s a global team? You’ll find various definitions if you surf around a bit, but the main features of a global team are what make them so difficult to manage – the people are dispersed geographically, they meet infrequently or never, and they come from different cultures. And these three factors conspire to make what’s usually easy, difficult – and what’s usually difficult, impossible. This program helps people who sponsor, lead or participate in global teams.

Participants learn to appreciate the true challenges of the dispersed environment. They learn how the economics of the dispersed environment differ from the economics of the face-to-face environment, and how the picture conveyed by the organizational cost management system distorts our view of these differences. Most important they learn strategies and tactics for making the dispersed environment productive and effective.

Mr. Brenner has held positions at Symbolics, Inc., and at Draper Laboratory, both of Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Symbolics, he was responsible for development of all products based on Macsyma, a large and very sophisticated computer algebra program. At Draper Laboratory, he was a principal investigator in a DARPA program, the Evolutionary Design of Complex Software, where he conducted research into advanced concepts for real-time software development environments based on dynamic object-oriented programming languages. Since 1993, he has taught a course in business modeling at the Harvard University Extension School.

Mr. Brenner holds a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He trained in Satir methods under Gerald M. Weinberg and Jean McLendon, attending and staffing many of their workshops over a period of seven years. His interests focus on improving personal and organizational effectiveness, especially in abnormal situations, as in the case of continuous change, in technical emergencies, and high-pressure project situations. He writes and edits a free email newsletter, Point Lookout, and has written a number of essays on these subjects, available at his Web site, http://www.ChacoCanyon.com.