Us & Them

We hired a new IT firm to upgrade our exchange server.  Today was the third and final day of the upgrade, and by the end of business, we couldn’t send emails to our colleagues in India.  Turns out that our office manager forgot to remind the IT guy that we’ve got 150 email addresses in Gurgaon.  Likewise, it never occurred to theIT guy that our offshore office might really be offshore.  Oops.

This is an example of why I suspect that the team building consultants we’re scheduled to meet with next week just won’t get it.  Offshore operations redefine the concept of teams.  We’ll see next week if these consultants can demonstrate at least a rudimentary understanding of what team dynamics really mean to us.