International Issues

Abstract

The teams that we’ve worked on in the last 10 years have all been international in scope. And being a member of a virtual team for a United States corporation, but being physically located in another country, can have it’s own set of problems, including time zone differences, infrastructure challenges, cultural issues, and language barriers. From an international perspective, we interviewed individuals in Australia, France, and Japan. We spoke with two members of the Hewlett-Packard PC COE team (discussed in Chapter 8), Geoff Markley, from Australia, and David Brehm, who spent part of his PC COE years living in California, and part living in France. We also interviewed Takehiko Kato from Japan who came to work in the US for four months in order to build stronger ties with his teammates and experiment with technology that was not yet available in Japan.