(audience applauding) - What a great group of sessions. And it seems like everything tied into what I'm going to talk to you about today. Collaboration. It's a real passion of mine. Actually I got to tell you something. Academia is a second career for me. I actually spent about 25 years in international business, international marketing. So this gives me the opportunity to kind of take my passion from my past to my passion of the present and take it into the future. So, what's the most valuable asset that a firm has? Some people might say it's the technology that it has, the equipment, it might be the infrastructure, it might be the processes. Not even close. 

 The most valuable asset that a firm has is its people. I know that's kind of sacrilegious for a marketing professor to talk about human resources, but it's true. When people get together, when people collaborate, amazing things can happen. They can solve the toughest problems. They can come up with the most creative ideas. New products, new services. When they get together and it works, it's magic. It's absolutely magic. Now how does this dovetail into what I do? Well I told you my passion is international and we have folks around the globe, even in our own institution, we are connected to so many different schools, so many different organizations all over the world. And we have the opportunity to learn with them, to work with them, to make something better. 

Now the technology is there and the technology is amazingly stable. Certainly better than it's been in the past. When I first did my first multicultural virtual team, 1983. I was president of the Danish phone company and it was a good thing that I was the president of a telecommunications company because the technology that we used costs millions and millions of dollars. Now it's at our fingertips. Our laptops, our phones can connect us with people all over the world. The collaborative platforms that are available to us, many of which are of no charge. So what do we need to do? Well, what the heck, let's just plug everybody in and whether you're in Siberia or Sidney or Sacramento, you can connect and you can collaborate. Think about it, just think about it. The greatest minds of an organization, location is no longer an issue because everybody regardless of where they are they can collaborate with each other. 

Man is sounds like utopia doesn't it? Outstanding. So, it's been going on for a long time. What typically happens when we have people from different cultures collaborate using these virtual technologies? (audience laughing) Boom. More times than not it's a disappointment and many times it's an out and out failure. You know, it would be so easy if we didn't have to deal with those people.  People just kind of muck it up, but the reality is that it's people that make it work.  Interesting study was published in 2009 looking at how the degree of distribution of team members impacted team performance. When you have the opportunity to be face to face, person to person, productivity is pretty good. But just move them around the building. Move them to a different site. 

Move them to a different city. Move them to a different country. Move them to a different continent and you can see how the effectiveness and the efficiency's of the team decrease.  So here we are a paradox. We have all this great technology and we just can't figure out how to harness it.  What are some of the problems that we run into? Well one, the technical term of this is social loafing, but let's face it, we've all done this. When we're part of a group, sometimes we rely on the group members more than we should. We let somebody else do the work, but wait, what else do we do? If we're on a virtual conference call. Oh I see you guys smiling out there. You know that you do this stuff. 

You multitask. I must admit, I do too. I do too, yeah, okay. True confessions. Yeah, we do other things. We're so easily distracted.  But wait, there's one more thing we need to talk about and that's the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  I run into this every time I do one of these collaboration projects with our sister school in Germany. And that is this issue of culture. Now, on both sides of the Atlantic our teams, our people, our students are relatively diverse, not necessarily all English and American and English speakers as they're here and they're certainly not all German there so we have a tremendous amount of diversity in the teams that we work with, with our multicultural collaboration. 

And what do I hear from the American side? I hear oh those Germans, they are so bossy. They just think that they're responsible for everything and they're just going to take charge and I'm not going to listen to them. And that's the guys.  The Germans, what do they think? Those Americans they're so laid back, they're so lazy, they speak in tongues. They have expressions and I have no idea what they mean and they know, but we don't. Just one example of what this little thing called culture can mean to virtual teamwork. It's tough. When people don't speak the same language, when people aren't in the same time zones, it's really difficult to have successful collaboration despite all the technology that we have. So how do we make these multicultural teams more effective? How do we make them work better together? There is a tremendous amount of advice out there.  The research is loaded with it. 

Do the good stuff, don't do the bad stuff. Well, duh, (laughs) okay, I need to communicate. I need to listen. I need to be aware that somebody has a different culture. Whoopi. Tell me something I don't know. So let me share with you three pieces of advice for virtual teamwork that I've developed through the research that my team has been doing on this topic. The first thing deals with the organization and team complexion. This is actually the result of about 30 multicultural teams, student teams, that have worked on our German collaboration, German, U.S. collaboration and what we have found, now one thing that I should preface this with is that not all teams are created equal. So what that means is that there's differences in degrees of distribution. 

We saw that earlier in that research. Degrees of virtuality. Do they have a chance to get face to face or are they doing their project completely virtual? Team familiarity. Do you know the people you're working with? Language, cast complexity, a whole host of variables come into play when you're defining what a virtual team is. So what we've actually found is that we can reduce what are called the fault lines, the us versus them, if we have a moderate degree of differences, cultural differences. So, two Americans, two Germans, a Norwegian and a Swede, a Chinese and a Korean. Put those on a team and that team will have moderate degree of heterogeneity and it will function well. It will function well. But have half Americans, half Germans, or everybody's from some place else, they can't even figure out when they're going to make a phone call. So moderate differences actually works best in teams. 

 Another thing that has to happen at the team level is it has to develop its own culture. Everybody comes at it from their cultural perspective, their cultural bias and you got to throw that away and the team has to develop its own culture. When is it going to communicate? How is it going to communicate? Who's going to communicate to whom? When are things going to be done? Don't ask somebody from Brazil tell me when you're going to get it done because they're going to say soon.  And soon may be tomorrow or next week, you just don't know.  The third advice and this deals with the individual. It's important to have a buddy and this is something that we've recently instituted with our cross border collaboration project. So what we have is an American student who is paired with a student in Germany and we try to keep them as diverse as possible. We make them buddies, they are responsible for each other, each other's work. If one disappears, we've got that guy from Greece that decides that it's Easter and because it's Easter he's going to disappear for three weeks. Well that American buddy is going to know that the Greek student has disappeared and is going to cover for them. 

There's a lot more that we have to learn about virtual teamwork, but suffice to say, we have the opportunity to put the world in our hands. The technology is there. And we have the cultural sensitivity to be able to get the job done if we develop hybrid cultures within teams, if we structure our teams correctly, and if those individuals are really dedicated to getting the job done.  It's a great opportunity. It's all at our fingertips. Let's put the world in our hands. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)