Harvard Business Review



May 2004


Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?


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The Cold War had been good to Rocketdyne, Boeing’s propulsion and power division. Starting in 1958, when the United States launched its first orbiting satellite, all the way through the 1980s, Rocketdyne was the dominant producer of liquid-fuel rocket engines. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, makers of communications and weather satellites started favoring the cheaper engines coming out of a newly independent Russia.

In response, Bob Carman, a program manager at Rocketdyne, envisioned an engine that was radically simpler and cheaper than anything in its catalog. But to design it, Carman needed people with a depth of expertise that didn’t exist within Rocketdyne’s two offices in Canoga Park, California. He needed the best simulation-software stress analysts, who knew how to test alternative designs on the computer so the company wouldn’t have to build expensive prototypes, and he needed engineers who knew how to manufacture extremely precise parts in low volumes. The top simulation analysts worked at MSC Software, 100 miles away in Santa Ana, California, and the manufacturing engineers worked at Texas Instruments in Dallas. Remarkably, both groups had experience not only in modifying others’ product designs for their own purposes but in originating them, a task more commonly the province of design engineers.

Going outside for expertise, specifically by forming partnerships with companies that had never produced a rocket engine, was viewed by Rocketdyne executives as “blasphemous,” Carman recalls. Yet the eight-person group he assembled, about one-tenth the normal size, managed to design a reusable rocket engine, called SLICE, in only one-tenth the time span it took to develop its predecessors—and 1% of the actual number of hours. Featuring a thrust chamber and turbopumps with only a few parts each instead of hundreds, it cost millions of dollars less to manufacture. The team was able to do all this even though the only physical meeting held included just five of its members, and the group as a whole spent only about 15% of each workweek over ten months on the project. The very first sample unit it produced passed what is known as cold-flow testing, a simulation stage in rocket development that few designs ever reach.

How did Carman pull off this amazing feat? By using modern communications technology to fashion a virtual, far-flung team of diverse talents that no face-to-face team could match, even if its members uprooted themselves to come work together, or commuted between their home offices and the team’s site, for the project’s entire length. Carman then managed it so that the team’s range of functions, disciplines, and temperaments didn’t produce disarray.

In studying the Rocketdyne team, we noticed it had some unusual characteristics. Team members got to know one another well, though they spent absolutely no time together in person after the project began. They became remarkably attentive to one another’s responses, though shifts in body language or facial expression were mostly invisible. They were working in areas outside their expertise but benefited greatly from being able to stay in familiar surroundings, continue working in their own organizations, and consult their local colleagues and extensive paper files.

We began to wonder whether other teams like SLICE existed. In 2002, we conducted a benchmarking study of successful virtual teams. (See the sidebar “Learning the Secrets of Far-Flung Teams.”) Some were global, others regional. Half had members from more than one company. Half were long-term, and half had been set up just for a single project. All of them convinced us that when a project requires a diversity of competencies and perspectives and the work can be done by means of electronic documents and tools, it’s better to opt for a far-flung team than for one that works face-to-face. Such teams not only have a wider variety of communication channels at their command but also are free of many of the psychological and practical obstacles to full and effective participation that hobble their traditional counterparts.

For instance, several team members mentioned that they contributed much more during virtual meetings than they would have in face-to-face settings. They said they felt compelled to articulate their views more precisely than if they had depended on visual cues. Although many did affirm the value, in theory, of meeting together in the same room, few in practice found it essential. On the contrary, they asserted, holding such traditional meetings would have harmed the teams’ work processes. Decisions in a complex project have to be made continually. Postponing them until everyone assembles slows everything down—way, way down. If such a meeting is in the offing, everyone expects it to be where the real work will take place and avoids doing anything of value until the meeting occurs. Our far-flung leaders dealt with that problem by never holding one. As one team leader said, “There’s nothing we don’t discuss virtually.”

Indeed, much of the value of virtual teams derived from members’ ability to be in two places at once. Remaining tightly linked to their local organizations allowed them to keep their teammates current on developments there. Long or frequent absences would have made that difficult, in addition to diminishing team members’ value to their home units.


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Ann Majchrzak (majchrza@usc.edu) is a professor of information systems at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the coauthor of the September–October 1996 HBR article “Breaking the Functional Mind-Set in Process Organizations.” Arvind Malhotra (Arvind_Malhotra@kenan-flagler.unc.edu) is an assistant professor of information technology and e-commerce at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill. Chief Scientist Jeffrey Stamps (Jeff.Stamps@netage.com) and CEO Jessica Lipnack (Jessica.Lipnack@netage.com) are cofounders of the Boston-based consulting firm NetAge; they are the authors of six books on networked organizations, including, most recently, Virtual Teams: People Working Across Boundaries with Technology (John Wiley, 2000).


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