Time (Zone) Travelers

Plantronics will break ground for the factory in the fall, along with a 1,000-resident apartment building nearby. In Suzhou, it's customary to provide housing for workers, and by offering apartments with air-conditioning, a laundromat, a minimart, a cafeteria, an entertainment center, and 24-hour-a-day hot water (a luxury for the region), Plantronics hopes to keep a lid on turnover. At the factory, there will be covered parking for 1,000 bicycles.

But why go to all the trouble? Why not just try to forge closer ties with local suppliers? "It's easier to control quality when you own the manufacturing process, rather than trying to influence someone else's process," Fry says. "If you own the equipment, and the employees work for you, you can find improvements and enhancements as you go. You have better relationships with the suppliers of raw materials, because you're part of the network there, and you're invested in the community."

Suzhou isn't the only place Plantronics is increasing its presence. Consumer headsets like the MX150 represent nearly 25% of its overall revenues, up from almost nothing 10 years ago. And consumers are much more fashion-conscious than the pilots and office workers who once were Plantronics' core customers. So its designers have been spending more time in fashion capitals like Paris and Milan, creating concept drawings of futuristic headsets to explore different designs. The global pulse checking and global sourcing fit neatly together: The aim is both to get a better handle on what customers around the world want, and to do a better job of giving it to them. "We have a saying here: 'Sell all you want, we'll make more,' " Walters says. "We need to make sure that we can always say that -- and mean it."

Athens, Greece

Even in May, with three months left until the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, the ATHOC headquarters throb with the intensity of a college campus during finals. The average age of an ATHOC employee seems to be in the mid-twenties. The corridors bustle with traffic, and everyone is fueled by tall glasses of coffee frappe, a high-octane blend of Nescafe instant coffee, water, sugar, and milk, served cold. ATHOC is situated in Maroussi, a suburb about five miles from the city center.

In the midst of this sea of activity, the Atos Origin team doesn't seem at all addled or agitated. That's probably because a company Atos absorbed worked as a subcontractor to the Olympics in the 1992 Games in Barcelona; it then took the lead role for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

By contrast, you can't blame the Athens organizing committee members for hyperventilating. These are the first, and the only, games they'll ever be involved with. So one of the challenges for Atos is to bring local expectations down to earth. "The local organizing committee always wants to put on the best Olympics ever," says Philipps. "Their IT director always comes in with brand-new sexy ideas. We say, 'The technology has to be low profile. These aren't the Games of Technology. We just have to make sure it works.' There's a six-month phase to get that understood." Atos aims to reuse 90% of the software it has developed for previous Olympics, because that technology has been tested and proven -- and because it's cheaper than writing everything anew.

Philipps's cell phone rings every seven minutes with someone presenting him with a new problem or question. Sometimes he answers it in English, other times in French. Philipps also speaks German and Spanish, and he's picking up a little Italian as he begins to work on the Turin games.

This week, Philipps has overseen the delivery of a new software release developed by Atos programmers in Barcelona. (There are regular Tuesday conference calls with the software developers there, some of whom will be in Athens during the games, and some of whom will stay in Spain in case any last-minute software patches are needed.) His team has been taking apart a test system used over the weekend for a mountain-biking competition, and setting up a test system at the still-unfinished main stadium for a track-and-field event this weekend. (These pre-Olympics competitions are held to work the kinks out of the newly built sporting venues.) On Friday, there is a major meeting with representatives of the IOC's technology oversight team. The second -- and final -- technical dress rehearsal is approaching, when 60% of the systems for the games will be tested at the actual venues.