Time (Zone) Travelers

Claude Philipps is not a happy man.

He's standing in the middle of a sea of cubicles at the headquarters of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Organising Committee, the group responsible for putting on the Summer Olympics this month.

There are 85 days left until the games begin. Philipps is the guy whose job it is to ensure that the entire technology infrastructure for the Athens Olympics is in place before then. He has just learned that a key network connection from the primary data center to the backup center elsewhere in Athens hasn't been set up, and he's steamed. He's speaking English, but it might as well be Greek for all the acronyms. "Look, let's talk to ATHOC" -- that's the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Organising Committee -- "or let's talk to the IOC" -- that would be the International Olympic Committee -- "or let's talk to whoever we need to talk to," Philipps tells one of his managers. "But let's get it done by Monday morning, or I will raise hell."

Philipps has reason to dial up the heat. The French native leads a systems-integration team of Atos Origin, an IT company based in France and the Netherlands, which wrote the software and is installing much of the hardware that will run the games. Atos technology will issue credentials to 200,000 athletes, judges, coaches, and media reps; it will collect and distribute every scrap of data about timing and results; and it will make sure hackers or technical snafus don't disrupt the competition.

The Atos Origin team that Philipps heads is nearly as multiculti as your average Olympic village: It's made up of 280 people from 23 countries. And Philipps himself is a globe-trotter extraordinaire. He moved with his family from Salt Lake City to Athens in 2001, and from here he has been traveling to Turin, Italy, and Beijing to help with preparations for the Olympics in 2006 and 2008. The day after the Athens games end -- literally, on August 30 -- Philipps will pick up and move to Turin with his wife and teenage son for the next Winter Olympics.

After a dozen years and five previous Olympic Games, Philipps and Atos understand more about what it takes to succeed as a global business than most companies that boast about being "borderless enterprises." Collaborating across time zones, geographical distances, and cultural chasms is second nature to Atos. It's just the air that Philipps and his colleagues breathe. That kind of global fluidity -- rising above the jet lag and language differences to make things happen -- is quickly emerging as an essential (but rare) competitive edge.

"No matter what kind of business you run, no matter what size you are, you're suddenly competing against companies you've never heard of all around the world, who make a very similar widget or provide a very similar service," says Harold Sirkin, a senior vice president at the Boston Consulting Group and the head of the firm's global operations practice. "It's more of an imperative to be global, and to be smart about it, than it's ever been before."

Global all-stars like Atos, GE Healthcare Technologies, and Plantronics, the world's largest maker of telephone headsets, aren't global merely because they're chasing low-cost labor, or even because they're trying to gain entry to new and fast-growing foreign markets. Instead, they're building webs of talent across the world so that they can design better products, solve problems faster, gain more control over manufacturing, and benefit from creative people no matter which countries' passports they carry.

I traveled halfway around the world -- 17,777 miles -- over 30 days, to meet some of these transnational teams and to see first-hand how this new approach to global collaboration works.

Waukesha, Wisconsin

The world's most advanced CT scanner is parked inside Bay 56, a lead-lined testing room at GE Healthcare Technologies headquarters here. Outside the room, a team of GE engineers led by Duane Filtz is trying to iron out the last few kinks. It's 8:45 on a Wednesday morning in early June, and this first-of-its-kind scanner, known as the LightSpeed VCT (for volume computed tomography), is due to be shipped out on Saturday to Froedtert Hospital & Medical College across town, installed on Sunday, and producing images of patients on Monday.

The dozen people standing outside Bay 56 are all wearing protective lab glasses, and they're staring intently at clipboards, or the "Hot Issues" list perched on an easel. "We've got lots of tests to get through by the end of the week," Filtz says. "We had some scan aborts yesterday" -- when a test scan stopped inexplicably -- "and we need to get the fixes for those into the software." There will be another meeting at 4 p.m. today to review the day's progress.

When it goes into production later this year, the $2 million LightSpeed VCT will be the fastest and highest-resolution CT scanner available. It can scan the entire body in less than 10 seconds, gathering 5 gigabaud of information a second, and can capture a three-dimensional image of a patient's heart in five beats.