Book description
Praise for Uniting the Virtual Workforce
"Uniting the Virtual Workforce offers much-needed guidance on how
to navigate the largely unmapped territory of virtual work environments
in the global economy. The authors do an outstanding job of presenting
how organizations should address the challenges of virtual workforces so
as to reap the huge potential benefits of increased growth,
productivity, and innovation."
-C. Warren Axelrod, PhD, Chief Privacy Officer and Business Information
Security Officer, U. S. Trust, and author of Outsourcing Information Security
"Lojeski and Reilly bring us something that readers of business
books so rarely get-no nonsense practical guidance on how to manage
distance, especially where it most often serves as an impediment to
working effectively.? If you interface with widely dispersed team
members who rarely see one another and communicate by virtue of
impersonal electronics, you may expect to find this book provocative,
counterintuitive, and above all, exciting. It gives all of us who have
to struggle, while working with talent stretched across distance, hope,
that maybe there are ways to do this right!"
-Patrick J. McKenna, author of First Among Equals?
"A must-read for global corporate executives who manage
geographically dispersed job sharing teams. Practical strategies for
preventing productivity loss and optimizing innovation. The authors pull
no punches in showing the real downsides to the virtual work phenomenon;
they have done a great service for us all."
-Jeff Saperstein, author of Creating Regional Wealth in the Innovation Economy
"Uniting the Virtual Workforce charts the course for competing in
the twenty-first century by tapping into the powers of virtual work. Any
manager who ignores the virtual workforce is underperforming, and any
company or organization that does not appreciate virtual work is already
at a competitive disadvantage. Karen and Dick have tapped into a key
ingredient in the recipe for global growth."
-Jerry MacArthur Hultin, President, Polytechnic University, and former
Under Secretary of the Navy
"Authors Sobel Lojeski and Reilly have provided a useful primer for
the harried executive striving for productivity improvements while
seeing the workload expand and the workforce disperse. Using conceptual
definitions of Physical, Operational, and Affinity Distance to describe
the multifaceted dimensions of building teams of people to work
effectively together, the authors construct a very powerful set of
metrics for a manager to improve the capability of his or her workgroup,
no matter where it resides or how it is composed. The book is rich in
anecdotes and specific studies that illustrate the concepts in an
engaging, pertinent, and easy-to-understand manner. In an age of
outsourcing, offshoring, and decentralizing groups of people who have to
get things done together, reading this small book will repay itself many
times over."
-Charles House, Director, Media X Lab at Stanford University, and former
Director of the Societal Impact of Technology, Intel Corporation
Karen Sobel Lojeski, PhD, is CEO of Virtual Distance International,
a consulting firm specializing in measuring and managing the impact of
virtual distance in the workforce; a contributing writer to
CIOInsight. com; and a popular speaker on Virtual Distance and the
impact it has on today's workplace.
Richard R. Reilly, PhD, is a Professor of Management at the Wesley J.
Howe School of Technology Management at the Stevens Institute of
Technology and Chief Technology Officer at Virtual Distance
International. E He is the coauthor of Blockbusters: The Five Keys to
Developing Great New Products.
