The Road Not Taken

Bob Gett

President and Chief Executive Officer
Viant Corp.
Boston, Massachusetts

As a professional-services company, we have been very concerned about the amount of travel that we require of our staff. One of our key objectives when we designed Viant's operating model was to minimize travel.

How are we doing that? We've decided to establish offices in major cities, and we've opened 10 so far. Each office offers all of our services but only works with clients in its own metropolitan area. Instead of doing work at a client's location, we're now doing everything in-house -- which means less travel, even within a particular area. Employees receive bonuses based on their ability to share information across departments, offices, and groups. The result is an automatic companywide exchange that helps eliminate a lot of face-to-face group meetings. Since everybody is a shareholder, and everybody's bonus is based on companywide performance, there's a real financial incentive to share information. We've actually found that incentive programs based on an individual's performance can be counterproductive.

As we expand, we're focusing on maintaining our corporate culture. A lot of companies that want to expand quickly into a city buy a local company, put a new name on its door, and, voila, they have a presence. We don't do that. When we go into a new city, we send in a launch team of 6 to 10 Viant-experienced people who form a nucleus there. Our culture, our processes, and our vision are immediately planted, and they grow organically.

Bob Gett (bgett@viant.com) is president and CEO of Viant, an Internet-consulting firm that has worked with such clients as American Express, General Motors, J. Crew, Kinko's, Sears, and Sony Pictures Entertainment to plan, build, and launch their digital businesses. Viant has also helped build such virtual businesses as della.com, sputnik7.com, and Wit Capital Corp. The company went public a year ago and is listed on NASDAQ under VIAN.

Shankar Sastry

Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Bioengineering
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California

People often say that there's no substitute for face-to-face interactions. I disagree. In some cases, technology can replace travel and actually provide a more human experience than in-person contact does.

I'm working on a project that will enable surgeons to operate remotely, using minimally invasive techniques, on patients who are in other cities. With this technology, a surgeon can sit at a computer and use a virtual-reality training simulator to repeat a procedure until it's perfected. When the surgeon gives the okay, the instrument repeats the surgeon's movements, but this time, it's on a live patient. Such instruments add precision to a procedure, because they're designed to compensate for involuntary movements in a surgeon's hands.

People hate hospitals. This technology can bring health care into homes, and it can provide a more human experience than traditional face-to-face interventions ever could.

Shankar Sastry (sastry@darpa.mil) is on leave from the University of California, Berkeley and is now director of information technology for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in Washington, DC. At Berkeley, he has helped design millirobotics for minimally invasive surgery, a new air-traffic-management system to help alleviate congestion at airports, and a theoretic model for learning and adapting to biological systems.

Steve Poltrock

Technical Fellow, Boeing Phantom Works
Boeing Co.
Bellevue, Washington

I work in the research division of Boeing, improving the way people in remote locations use technology to collaborate and studying how technology affects and changes the way people work. Long-distance collaboration is a very important issue at Boeing: Every new commercial aircraft that we create involves hundreds of design teams that are located in different cities throughout the United States. We've studied how teams work together, and we've come up with a few guidelines to help improve that process.

First, technology should never replace face-to-face contact. When Boeing begins building a new airplane, the first thing that it does is to bring the project's team leaders and other key people together. That initial face-to-face meeting helps people get to know one another, builds trust, and helps people to agree on goals.

Second, when people are teleconferencing, everyone involved must be very conscious of social behavior. People know how to behave in group meetings, but certain parameters must be established to make a teleconference effective. For instance, it's important to designate a meeting facilitator -- someone who makes sure that everyone feels included and gets heard.