The Road Not Taken

Ann McGee-Cooper

Founder and Partner
Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates
Dallas, Texas

If you want to cut down on your travel, stop assuming that you need to be everywhere in person. There are many other ways to be represented. Coach other people, and send them to meetings. That will give them the opportunity to take responsibility.

Most people's knee-jerk reaction to a problem is to figure out who the top-level decision makers are and to call a meeting. Typically, no one thinks to call in whoever is closest to the problem. Senior management huddles and then goes back to the field to announce the solution to lower-level people.

You can cut your travel time in half by thinking more creatively. Ask yourself, Who's being left out? Are different perspectives available? Who has seen this pattern before? All of that groundwork can be done by phone. Instead of going to a meeting yourself, send someone who is closer to the problem and who may have a good idea. Back that person up by sending another person along for visible support.

Also, reconsider where everyone is meeting. Instead of meeting at headquarters, meet wherever the problem is most concentrated. Have other workers fill in for the ones who are traveling to that site, and let them in on the decision-making process. You'll earn their respect and gain their commitment to the solution. Think creatively, and you can make an impact -- without setting foot on a plane.

Ann McGee-Cooper (Ann@amca.com) was an early member of Southwest Airlines's culture committee. Her firm has worked with TD Industries for more than two decades. Her most recent book is "Time Management for Unmanageable People" (Bantam, 1994).

Neil Isford

Vice President, e-Business Services
IBM Global Services
Somers, New York

In the new world of e-business, people have to collaborate and share ideas. But building a team can be difficult when team members spend all of their time on the road. I manage IBM's e-business consulting division, which comprises people who do everything -- from Web design to strategy to systems integration. We've begun to focus on collaboration by creating innovation centers, in an effort to bring work and customers in, rather than sending our associates out. Our prototype facility in Atlanta, which has been open for seven years, houses a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, an iguana, and a three-legged dog. All of the centers have couches, open space, meeting areas and workrooms, and a design studio. By the end of the year, we'll have about a dozen centers open in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States.

We've learned from the Atlanta location that these facilities are very successful among customers, because they provide a comfortable, well-equipped environment in which they can meet our team. And because people are sick of traveling, these centers are attracting top-notch folks to IBM.

Employees also have more opportunities to share ideas. We developed a technology for a Java real-time scoreboard that was used at the U.S. Open tennis tournament. We used that same technology to create a real-time stock tracker for NYSE.com. The idea for using that technology for NYSE.com came about during a casual chat among programmers and strategists about some of the projects that they were working on. There's power in bringing people together instead of dispersing them.

Neil Isford (isford@us.ibm.com) is responsible for 2,000 strategists, interactive designers, developers, and systems integrators at IBM. The company's first innovation center, in Atlanta, houses 400 associates.

Jorg Haake

Division Manager of Collaborative Work and Learning
GMD -- German National Research Center for Information Technology
Darmstadt, Germany

If people travel so that they can communicate and collaborate, the only way to reduce travel is to find ways to connect by using technology. And when you work with technology, you're really working with people, their social attitudes, their superstitions, and their rules. I learned that lesson while I was working on a pilot project on using technology to link government offices in Berlin and Bonn.

After reunification, the parliament decided to readopt Berlin as Germany's capital. Parliament decided to move out of Bonn over a 20-year period. My project's goal was to support long-distance negotiations and to coordinate meetings between working groups in the ministry of the interior. We set up "team rooms," which were basically videoconferencing areas. But the shape of the rooms created terrible acoustics.

One solution was to use microphone earplugs, which would give everyone the highest-quality audio. Unfortunately, lower-level civil servants who worked for the ministers were (wrongly) convinced that their bosses wouldn't wear earplugs. So we ended up buying very expensive audio equipment that marginally improved sound quality. That could have been avoided if we had just involved the end users in the decision-making process. It's funny, but the lessons of technology often have little to do with technology itself.

Jorg Haake (haake@darmstadt.gmd.de) heads one of six divisions in the German National Research Center for Information Technology. GMD is a nonprofit institution that conducts IT research and does contract work for companies and government agencies.