Virtual Teams: People Working Across Boundaries with Technology [Hardcover]

Jessica Lipnack (Author), Jeffrey Stamps (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0471388254 | ISBN-13: 978-0471388258 | Edition: 2

Praise for the First Edition of Virtual Teams

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

"Lipnack and Stamps have written an important book for the twenty-first-century corporation."
—Regis McKenna, The McKenna Group, author, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Virtual teams and networks?effective, value-based, swiftly reconfiguring, high-performing, cost-sensitive, and decentralized?will profoundly reshape our shared world. As members of many virtual groups, we will all contribute to these ephemeral webs of relationships that together weave our future." ?from Virtual Teams, Second Edition

There are no such things as boundaries in today?s work environment. Virtual teams from all over the world use technologies like the Internet, intranets, and groupware to work together on projects?but the major drawback to these teams is their high failure rate. Virtual Teams examines the numerous problems that arise and provides you with proven techniques to solve them.

Written by the two leading experts in networked organizations, this Second Edition shows you how to effectively start, implement, and maintain virtual teams in your own organization. Lipnack and Stamps present a comprehensive framework that makes virtual teams accessible and practical, describing the best practices to use in order to make your group excel.

The authors present the 90/10 Rule, which stresses how a virtual team?s success is based 90% on the people involved and 10% on the technology. They also take you through the seven steps that every team must complete in order to achieve their results. These include:

• Creating a team identity
• Drafting a mission statement and setting goals
• Determining milestones and establishing a schedule
• Identifying team members and their roles
• Choosing the appropriate media

Along with the authors? experiences, case studies from Sun Microsystems, Shell Oil, Pfizer, Motorola, Ernst & Young, and others are integrated throughout, offering insights from key executives on virtual teams and adapting to the virtual workplace.

With its in-depth look at this increasingly important way to work, Virtual Teams, Second Edition gives you the tools you?ll need to create and build a winning virtual team for your own organization.

From the Back Cover

Praise for the First Edition of Virtual Teams

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

"Lipnack and Stamps have written an important book for the twenty-first-century corporation."
—Regis McKenna, The McKenna Group, author, 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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 2 edition (September 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471388254
• ISBN-13: 978-0471388258
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #902,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jessica Lipnack is author, with Jeff Stamps, of Virtual Teams (Wiley)--along with five other books, including Networking (Doubleday), The Networking Book (Viking Penguin), and The Age of the Network (Wiley)--that have been translated around the world.

She started her career as a reporter at The Pottstown (PA) Mercury at age 16 where she began by writing weddings and obits and quickly progressed to covering local township supervisor meetings that were conducted in Pennsylvania Dutch. Lacking a translator, she soon was writing features and columns, including "Dear Beatrice," for which, as a teenager, she was unqualified to offer advice. Meanwhile, she served as editorial page editor of The George School News, her high school paper, assistant managing editor of the Antioch Record during college, and not too long after did freelance writing for Boston After Dark, now The Phoenix.

As a creative writer, Jessica's work has appeared in Ars Medica, Global City Review, Mothering, The Futurist, Five Star Literary Stories, Melusine, and Six Word Stories. Profiles of her appear in Writers in Profile and A Storied Career. She also has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, The Industry Standard, Dayton Daily News, New Age Journal (now Body+Mind), Mother Earth News, and many other publications. She's also written for The Brookings Institution, where she has lectured, and was an early contributor to Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Jessica's blog, Endless Knots, launched in 2005, has readers around the world. She has taught blogging in the Pine Manor MFA program, at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, and at the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference.

Noted articles and book chapters include "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" (Harvard Business Review), which also appears in "HBR's 10 Must-Reads on Teams;" "The Virtual, Networked Organization" (in The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams, Jossey-Bass); and "Bucky Fuller: The Prophet Comes Home" (Boston Globe). She also served as co-editor and principal writer for the U.S. Army's Teams of Leaders Handbook and has written forewords to many books.

When not writing, Jessica is knitting, gardening, doing yoga, and wasting time online.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful, but some fluff September 28, 2003

By jlion

Format:Hardcover

I purchased this book because I was intrigued. In much of the work I do I am a member of "virtual" teams. That is, I often am some distance apart from the people I am working with.

I found the book to be a slow read, with nuggets of information separated by deserts of fluff. The first half of the book is filled with vague ramblings about how the information age has changed the way that teams work and with case studies that illustrate how the forming of virtual teams has helped various companies solve difficult problems.

In the second half, the book begins to pick up. In a chapter entitled "Teaming with People" the authors discuss team dynamics, including essential roles with a team, how teams form and which aspects of team dynamics are especially subject to the stresses of distance communication.

The authors suggest that the beginning and closing phases of most projects are the most stressful on team members and that extra effort be exerted at the beginning phase of the project to bring the core project team members together, even if they are geographically separated. This, say the authors, will help build interpersonal relationships that can hold the team together in times of stress.

There are several optimum team sizes. 3 to 5 is the size of a core team, 5 to 25 the size of a "team family" and 25 to 200 the size of a "team camp". In the authors' opinion, any team larger than 5 people will naturally divide into sub-teams.

The authors also point out the value of rewarding teams. Making teams compete, or making them completely independent of one another has little value for the company. Cooperative goals can encourage and motivate all of the teams, while competition can demoralize them.

Finally, the authors talk about starting up teams and provide a checklist of some elements such as a customer and a management sponsor which are essential to any team's success.

Overall, I found the book to have some good information on forming and maintaining teams, and what to do when those teams are not located in the same physical location. There is some fluff, I feel, and the book could easily be half its current length without sacrificing much.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Teamwork" Re-defined for New Realities April 5, 2001

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The authors are convinced that, eventually, "virtual teams will become the natural way to work, nothing special. Virtual teams and networks -- effective, value-based, swiftly reconfiguring, cost-sensitive, and decentralized -- will profoundly reshape our shared world. As members of many virtual groups, we will contribute to these ephemeral webs of relationships that together weave our future." That day is already here for many people and I agree that virtual working relationships will soon be the rule rather than the exception. The authors correctly note that technology extends capabilities "but organizing to do things together is only human. The most profound change of the new millennium is in the way we're organized." Moreover, as more people connect online, "we increase our capacity for both independence and interdependence. Competition and cooperation both thrive in our new culture." However, there are perils to avoid because whatever goes wrong with in-the-same place teams can also go wrong with virtual teams -- only worse and, worse yet, faster and at a much greater cost.

The authors organize their excellent material within 14 chapters whose individual titles indicate each chapter's perspective on virtual teams: Why, Networks, Teams, Trust, Place, Time, Purpose, people, Links, Launch, Navigate, Theory, Think, and Future. I agree that a virtual team "is a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries." Nonetheless, I still have some quibbles about the authors' sequence of subject matter (not with the content itself) and am still convinced that cooperation between and among members of virtual teams is even more difficult than it is between and among those within physical boundaries. Moreover, my own rather extensive experience with all manner of corporate clients suggests that the most formidable barriers are between two ears. If you have some serious human barriers in your own organization, I urge you to check out O'Dell and Grayson's immensely thoughtful and practical book, If Only We Knew What We Know.

But please keep in mind that even if O'Dell, Grayson, Lipnack, and Stamps were retained to create virtual teams for your organization, unless and until everyone else involved buys into the enterprise, the results would be abysmal. Hence the importance of several points which Lipnack and Stamps make in the final chapter, notably the absolutely essential need for trust. "A presumption of trust enables a successful strategy of collaboration [enables everyone involved] to be better innovators, competitors, and survivors....If purpose is the glue, trust is the grease." I agree.

Of course, no single volume such as this can provide all the right answers but Lipnack and Stamps raise most (if not all) of the most important questions. Their answers seem sensible and practical. Of course, decision-makers must decide what the nature, extent, and duration of a virtual relationship should be in their organization at any given time. The authors do provide an excellent source of information and insight which can help virtually (pun intended) any organization increase cooperation and collaboration across boundaries through the effective use of various technologies. Especially, in this age of accelerating globalization, most organizations need all the help they can get.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical Ideas for Boundary-Crossing Teams October 15, 2000

By E. Kimball

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The very nature of teams has changed in most organizations. This change is not rooted in the use of technology but rather in organizational changes that require teams that cross all kinds of boundaries: organizational, temporal, geographic, functional, cultural. Virtual Teams focuses on the fundamental issues that challenge members, leaders, and stakeholders in these boundary-crossing teams rather than simply on the technology that connects them. A major strength of the book is the wealth of stories about how key ideas have been applied in both public and private sector organizations. This book offers practical ideas you can apply to any team - whether it is co-located or spread across the world. - Lisa Kimball, Executive Producer, Group Jazz