Practical Coach: Management Skills for Everyday Life, The

Managing Distributed Teams

Information Technology is no longer a business resource. It is the business environment.

—Browning, The Economist

Undoubtedly, distributed teams that effectively use electronic and computer-based information and communication technologies are often able to work faster and more flexibly than their face-to-face counterparts, create productive relationships that span organizational and geographic boundaries, and develop new and improved ways of working together and serving their customers. But, as Dartmouth researcher Mary Munter puts it, “the latest technological changes are only as effective as the people using them.”^[95]

This section provides general guidelines for using electronic and computer-based information and ...