It’s both good and bad that I can’t take my work home. These days my biggest limitation is technology. The work I do depends heavily on several expensive software packages. My employer has a policy disallowing the organization from paying for software for home computers, and these applications are too expensive for me to buy on my own dime. … Read more →
What: NYTimes article about Cisco’s showcasing its TelePresence system. Posts to which it is related: Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology Bottom line: This article reviews the use of Cisco’s TelePresence system during a press conference at which the company announced new servers. According to the author (Ashlee Vance), the press conference was too long, felt unnatural and… Read more →
I have several email addresses, and I use them each for different purposes. I never receive personal emails on my work account. The account that came with my Internet at home has been sacrificed to spam since I use that account for every website registration. I keep an old email address that’s hardly used just in case someone I haven’t spoken to in 10 years… Read more →
What: Story on NPR about the use of video conferencing in immigration courts. Posts to which it is related: Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Lessons from Victorian Technology Bottom line: This piece demonstrates some of the issues that arise when a form of virtual collaboration is used strictly for efficiency with no adjustments made for interacting virtually instead of… Read more →
Recently, warfare expert P. W. Singer appeared on several shows (NPR’s Fresh Air, The Daily Show) to talk about his new book Wired for War. While not necessarily the central focus of the book, one point he made caught my attention for its relation to virtual teams. Singer talked about a drone pilot who engages in war, but from afar… Read more →
What: CNN.com numbers about how people connected to the inauguration of President Obama. Posts to which it is related: What President Obama Teaches Us for Leading Virtually Bottom line: The numbers are staggering, and that’s a good sign by my reckoning. There are two things that I took away from this article. First, not only are massive number of people… Read more →
The Leading Virtually team regards virtual collaboration technology as a new wave of options for human interaction. Much like the advent of the Internet changed the way we communicate and interact, our growing ability to connect in virtual worlds has a similar potential to drive social change. In our modern world it’s easy to forget that at other times in human… Read more →
What: NYTimes article about Microsoft’s research in emerging markets Post to which it is related: Leading Virtual Communities: Do We Have the Answers? Bottom line: This article talks about some of the projects Microsoft teams are working on in emerging markets such as India. I love the idea of applying technology in creative ways to help social problems in countries that don’t have… Read more →
I recently read an article by Line Dube and Daniel Robey entitled “Surviving the paradoxes of virtual teamwork”. The authors, through their research, determined five paradoxes that are prevalent in the realm of virtual teamwork. They then made some suggestions for dealing with each paradox. In the rest of this post I will: List the authors’ five paradoxes and their… Read more →
A few weeks back, Surinder posted quick tips that virtual team leaders could use to deal with pressures to make their virtual teams more productive. I believe that sponsors and leaders of virtual team projects ought to also focus on another thing: training. While the times are challenging because of pressures to cut down costs, we strongly believe that the… Read more →