This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Mastering the management of a global business team calls for confronting several unique challenges that tend to exacerbate the more common problems facing all teams, point out authors Vijay Govindarajan, director of the Center for Global Leadership at Dartmouth College's Tuck School, and Anil Gupta, a professor of strategy and global e-business at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Of the 70 global business teams studied by the authors, about one-third rated their performances as largely unsuccessful. How can companies reverse the generally weak performance of faltering global teams? The authors' survey of 58 senior executives from five U.S. and four European multinational organizations reveals some hard-earned insights that may benefit your cross-border endeavors. When global business teams fail, it is often due to a lack of trust among team members. As a result, executives guiding global teams must institute processes that emphasize the cultivation of trust. Also high on the list of culpable factors are the hindrances to communication that geographical, cultural, and language differences cause. Even in the case of teams whose members speak the same language, differences in semantics, accents, tone, pitch, and dialects can be impediments. To mitigate the corrosive effects of these cross-cultural impediments, executives are advised to craft a cross-border team's charter, composition, and process carefully--with each aspect equally emphasized. The authors elaborate on how these work holistically to increase the odds that your global business teams will become high-performing sources of invaluable multinational experience leading to competitive advantage.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Unless an enterprise generates new knowledge and pumps it efficiently throughout its network, it will soon be playing tomorrow's game with yesterday's tools. Many rely on an information technology infrastructure; but no matter how sophisticated, it is not the key to effective knowledge management. Success, say the authors, depends more on the social system in which people operate--the social ecology of a company. Social ecology drives people's expectations, defines who will fit in, shapes individuals' freedom to pursue actions without prior approval, and affects how they interact with both insiders and outsiders. Focusing on Nucor Corp.'s success in the 1980s and 1990s, the authors suggest that it was the company's social ecology that contributed to it becoming one of the most efficient steel producers in the world. Through effective management of knowledge, Nucor developed and constantly upgraded its main strategic and proprietary competencies: plant construction and start-up know-how, manufacturing process expertise, and the ability to adopt breakthrough technologies earlier than competitors. Nucor's social ecology also allowed, among other things, excellence in the tasks associated with sharing and mobilizing knowledge: identifying opportunities to share knowledge, encouraging individuals to share knowledge, building effective and efficient transmission channels, and convincing individuals to accept and use the knowledge received. The authors explain how others can maximize knowledge sharing by setting stretch goals, providing high-powered incentives, cultivating empowerment, equipping every unit with a well-defined "sandbox" for experimentation, and cultivating an internal market for ideas. It's a difficult challenge. But its very difficulty means that companies tackling it successfully will have a competitive advantage that rivals cannot beat merely by buying the same software.

Offers a framework and set of conceptual ideas to guide firms in approaching the strategic challenge of casting their business lines overseas and building global presence: How should a multiproduct firm choose the product line to launch it into the global market? What factors make some markets more strategic than others? What should companies consider in determining the right mode of entry? How should the enterprise transplant the corporate DNA as it enters new markets? What approaches should it use to win the local battle? How rapidly should a company expand globally? Becoming global is never a precise result of a grand design, but it would be naive to view it as a sequence of incremental, ad hoc, opportunistic, and random moves. The wisest approach would be one of directed opportunism within a broad direction set by a systematic framework.