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Title: Virtual Teams : People Working Across Boundaries with Technology by Jessica Lipnack, Jeffrey Stamps ISBN: 0-471-38825-4 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 08 September, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Useful, but some fluff
Comment: 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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Aphoristic
Comment: I spent many hours with Lipnack & Stamps' Virtual Teams. Lipnack and Stamps are team consultants, and this book is one of their business cards. It's strong on axioms, moderate on bibliographic references, filled with trenchant observations derived from their consulting experiences, and written in a hurried style that reads like a draft or a condensed version of a larger book, despite its 300 pages. The authors provide dozens of taxonomies, some of which are useful and thought provoking, but most not deriving from research data. I obtained one item referenced in the bibliography, a middling-quality correlational study, but noticed the authors were quite creative in their interpretation of its results. Once you get past the aphoristic writing style ("Connected, linked, matrixed. We are the future now. . . Before we know it, 10-year-olds will be running the world. Perhaps they already are. . . The new virtual organizations are at once very old and very new, very small and very large . . . ") you'll find yourself reading many interesting nuggets of information combined with useful advice on how to build and manage a virtual team. I appreciated the fact that Lipnack and Stamps avoided treating the virtual team as a panacea or as a solution to team problems. Their cool approach to the formidable problems faced by distributed groups adroitly avoids the hype in which other authors engage. I also appreciated their extended discussions in the areas where virtual teams suffer the most, including trust and communication across time zones. Leadership got slight treatment, but perhaps for good reason-the DNA of effective leadership in general has yet to be cracked, and is a largely unexplored phenomenon in virtual teams.
Rating: 5
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Comment: Globalization can create as many problems as opportunities. One big problem is figuring out how to unite people worldwide to work on projects for your company. In an age that lacked a worldwide communications net, the answer would probably be quite depressing. However, as authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps make clear, the modern Internet makes it quite possible for workers all over the world to collaborate. The physical location of your firm’s various experts is no longer a barrier to effective team building, be they in Dublin, Bangalore, Las Vegas or Bangkok. In fact, the authors claim that companies that fail to create effective teams across cyberspace will be left in history’s dustbin. This might be overstating the case, but we [...] recommend this book for its candor about exactly how challenging it is to create virtual teams. Still interested? If so, this book serves as an excellent primer of both theory and practice.
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