The hunt (2)

Six teams, three cities, two continents separated by a dateline: scenarios of this type began for me in the early 1990s. I remember the first time I sent a proposal to HK using MCI Mail, a laborious process punctuated by anxious phone calls. I supported my firm's China practice from SF, which meant that my day restarted at five p.m. and extended into the evening. Like now, China was doing a lot better than California. The short fuse hasn't changed, either. Working over the long weekend with a distributed team, I've found that the means of interaction is not very different. The text I'm writing takes form as successive approximations. Tom Peters's rapid prototyping idea applies to this kind of writing: the most important thing is to pull a draft together. Doing so gives others something to work with, and it gets you into the material enough to start to see where the holes are.