Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Virtual teams

The global economy requires many organizations, especially those in manufacturing and technology, for reasons of economic efficiency and competitiveness, to operate in different geographic regions of the world.²⁹ This has led to the necessity, or perhaps the opportunity, of so-called virtual teams, composed of members located at different sites. Some organizations, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, have been managing much of their work through virtual teams for decades. Others, such as Furniture Brand, a conglomerate composed of several formerly independent furniture companies with household names, like Broyhill, Drexel, Henredon, Thomasville, and Lane, were forced into it due to massive changes affecting the global furniture industry over the last 20 years. These very different companies face the similar challenges of managing people and entire supply chains across many time zones, thousands of miles, and diverse cultures.

LEADERSHIP SPOTLIGHT

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most brilliant, and perhaps most tragic, Americans of the 20th century. Oppie was a gifted theoretical physicist at the University of California at Berkeley and Caltech, with a cultlike following of graduate students. He led the famous Manhattan ...