Last week’s Association for Operations Management International Conference & Expo in Denver was exhilarating for several reasons. For me personally, it was energizing because, being a local, it was no trouble at all just to breathe in the Mile High City. On a professional level, it was obvious that there was serious energy around the active theme “Elevate Supply Chain Performance,” and the emphasis on addressing the supply chain at strategic levels. Following up on a number of conversations during the conference, I will go deeper into several subjects that came up during my presentation “Accelerate the Performance of Your Virtual Teams.”

I mentioned the following citations at the conference, and it is clear that there is a huge opportunity for improvement in the realm of “elevating” performance.

• Employees are 243% more likely to have problems with distant co-workers
• Collaboration is 52% less effective when done via phone
• Teamwork is 34% less effective when done via videoconference
• Globally, only 21% of the workforce reports being “engaged”

With estimated failure rates for major organizational initiatives ranging from 72-91%, inability to execute on major projects costs hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Over the next few weeks we will examine in more detail the tools and processes that can be leveraged to improve performance

of virtual, as well as co-located, teams.