How to gain access to Virtual Working Summit materials

Richard Pooley: How to be a successful communicator when working virtually across borders

Richard Pooley is an expert on working internationally with the English language and how it can lead to problems across borders, especially in virtual teams. He’ll point out all sorts of mistakes we make unknowingly (some of these demonstrated by Penny, his interviewer!) He’ll show us how to overcome the pitfalls that exist for the unwary, both native and non-native English speakers.

Richard is the Managing Director of Canning International Training and Development. He has lived and worked all over the world, including countries across Africa, Middle East, North and South America, Japan and Europe. He launched Canning’s cross-cultural programmes many years ago and continues to work with a huge range clients, which include Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ,
the Economist Magazine, Panasonic and Specsavers. He’s contributed to three books on cross-cultural communication and international negotiation and is a visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Sanda Ionescu: Getting the Best out of Cross-Cultural Virtual Teams

Dr. Sanda Ionescu will help us to understand how to work effectively cross-culturally when you can’t be face to face.

Sanda is the founder of The Culture Broker, a consultancy specialising in fostering intercultural communication and cultural integration. Sanda has lived, studied and worked in nine countries, including Japan, Romania, US, Switzerland, Germany and France, and has researched in Anthropology at the Universities of Cambridge and London. She combines in-depth theoretical knowledge of cultural differences with more than twenty years of work experience. Clients include blue-chips such as Nokia, Standard Bank of South Africa, AstraZeneca, L’Oréal, Motorola and Shell.

David Rolston: Trends in Virtual Working

David will outline his top three trends driving virtual working and will go on to talk about some of the technologies that are emerging in the near term to make us even more effective.

David has been fascinated by virtual working since his first experiences in the 1960s. Since then he has worked in a variety of roles and industries including being General Manager of divisions of three large enterprises and being CEO of three small venture-backed companies. Two of those companies produced products to support virtual work. David is currently chairman of Image Metrics, a company that is doing research related to virtual work and the use of emotions and facial images to communicate even more effectively. He blogs at WorkingNowhere.

Penny Pullan: Adapting Risk Management for Virtual Working

Penny Pullan PhD PMP CPF, your Summit Host, gives us an overview of how we can even adapt difficult topics like risk management to work virtually. While risk workshops are often seen as tedious and dry when face to face, Penny will show us that it doesn’t have to be like that. Penny’s sessions always get positive feedback for how practical they are!

Penny is Director of Making Projects Work Ltd. and supports people who are grappling with tricky projects: be that virtual, risky, ambiguous or with complex stakeholder arrangements (or more likely, all four!) Gower published her first book last year, co authored with Ruth Murray-Webster, : ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’ which is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and elsewhere. Penny created the Virtual Working Summit as a result of her work with financial services, utilities, pharmaceutical and consultancy clients, as well as international charities. She saw the need for this forum and filled the gap.

Penny Pullan: Keeping People Interested and Engaged from Afar

Penny Pullan PhD PMP CPF, your Summit Host, introduces this year’s Virtual Working Summit. She’ll talk about the ways of working that are most effective when you can’t be face to face and what behaviours to avoid completely! Feedback on Penny’s sessions tells us to expect practical and useful suggestions that we can implement straight away.

Penny is Director of Making Projects Work Ltd. and supports people who are grappling with tricky projects: be that virtual, risky, ambiguous or with complex stakeholder arrangements (or more likely, all four!) Gower are just publishing her first book: ‘A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management’ which is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and elsewhere. Penny created the Virtual Working Summit as a result of her work with financial services, utilities, pharmaceutical and consultancy clients, as well as international charities. She saw the need for this forum and filled the gap.

Dr Stephen Thorpe: Better Online Relationships

Dr. Stephen Thorpe is a Director of Zenergy in New Zealand. He’s an academic, facilitator, trainer, and educator who specialises in group work in the online world. He is passionate about assisting people to collaborate using a range of online technologies and trains people around the world in online facilitation skills.

Stephen loves researching ways to enhance the effectiveness of online groups and his Ph.D. explored the use of storytelling in the facilitation of online relationship development. The results were pretty clear and we can use them to our advantage. In his talk, he’ll explain how.

Peter Taylor: The Lazy Guide to Virtual Working

Peter Taylor has become known as ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ since his bestselling book of the same name was published a couple of years ago. It focuses on productive laziness and draws on his experiences of getting things done through projects in international companies.

As you can imagine, Peter has been using virtual working for many years. He’ll talk about how the same productive laziness and applying the 80:20 rule appropriately can help to get things done virtually.

Rachel Smith and David Sibbet: Virtual Visual Meetings

Just as social networking has reclaimed the Internet for human interactivity and co-creation, the visual meetings movement is reclaiming creativity, productivity, and playful exchange for serious work in groups. Anyone can implement powerful visual tools like graphic recording, visual planning, storyboarding, graphic templates, and idea mapping in meetings that are face-to-face, entirely online, or a blending of both.

In this call, David Sibbet and Rachel Smith of The Grove Consultants International will introduce the concept of visual meetings, discuss ways to bring visual tools into meetings of all kinds, and share tips from their own experiences with virtual visual facilitation.

Be sure to take a look at the visual recording created during the call, too!

Founded in 1977 by David Sibbet, their President and Founder, the Grove has helped a range of clients, from Fortune 500 businesses to nonprofit organizations, meet a diverse set of organizational challenges and achieve their goals. Learn more at here.

David Sibbet is a master facilitator, author of ‘Visual Meetings’ and ‘Visual Teams’ as well as many of The Grove’s tools and models for facilitation, team leadership and organizational transformation. He has appeared on TED to demonstrate his ideas and how they make such a difference to people and groups.

Within the Grove, Rachel is Director of Digital Facilitation Services and, as such, develops ways to integrate technology into visual meetings. She is a skilled visual facilitator and works with groups both online and in person. She is recognized for her work in making new technologies approachable through talks, trainings, and written materials. She blogs at ninmah.be
To get a short video summary, have a look here.

Real People using Virtual Working Everyday

Coalface day: we have the stories of five different people who work virtually. Each person talks about their typical ‘virtual working’ day, what challenges they and their organisations face with this work and what works for them. You’ll find some really practical tips as well as some very strong common themes from Helen, Sue, Stephen, Brian and Miles. Each session is short – around ten minutes. Thank you to all of them for their time and contribution!

John Niland: Building Trust Remotely

When it comes to conveying credibility and building trust, we have a host of non-verbal resources in a face-to-face meeting: facial expression, dress-code, posture, eye-contact etc. But what about a teleconference? Or a crucial telephone call with a person we may never have met? Or a colleague we only see infrequently?

In this call John Niland (www.success121.com) will illustrate some of the classic pitfalls in a light-hearted way, and will talk about the real-life consequences (good and bad) that follow from how professionals use this vital medium.

You may want to catch up on this session for the simple reason that many professionals are unaware of how they come across … which in turn creates a lot of frustration when they don’t “connect” with colleagues and prospects.

Typical Feedback: By far the best was John Niland. He delivered a basis that works for all. Understanding the “audience” and developing trust are the very difficult credibility criteria. His “value-centred” approach is first class.

Nancy Settle-Murphy: Navigating Across Cross-Cultural Tripwires

It’s tough enough to get a handle on the cultural differences that can get in the way of successful virtual collaboration. But when people work from a distance, in the absence of vital visual cues, addressing and accommodating cultural differences becomes exponentially more difficult.

In this lively session, Nancy Settle-Murphy (www.guidedinsights.com) highlights the cultural differences that most often impede successful virtual collaboration, and offers practical tips and tools listeners can apply to their own unique situations, regardless of the cultures.

Typical Feedback: Nancy’s discussion on cultural tripwires was wonderful. It would be worth hearing again. Provided specific practical tips.

John Flynn: Tools for Successful Virtual Working

John is based in SanFrancisco with Ring2, a multinational conference call provider. He’ll summarise the technology solutions that are available to virtual teams, giving the pro’s and cons of each in terms of features, benefits, costs and complexity/simplicity. In addition, he’ll introduce some client “case studies” including Doug Arbulu of Bain and Company, who will outline the mix of tools they’ve deployed and why.

Typical Feedback: I would like to hear John Flynn and Doug Arbulu again. The practical advice from John Flynn and Doug Arbulu was great, so more from all of these would be good.

Jean Binder: Communication on global projects

Jean Binder is the award-winning author of ‘Global Project Management’ . He is a certified project manager (PMP) and has more than 20 years of experience working in project environments, most of them living abroad and communicating in multi-cultural and multi-language environments. Jean has particular experience of managing global projects, having implemented collaborative tools and techniques in a number of global organizations. The Global Project Management Framework developed during his academic studies is explained on the website GlobalProjectManagement.org.

Typical feedback: A really relevant and interesting session. I think it brings us back into the reality of managing a diverse workgroup across geographies.

Pete Bennett: The seven dirty tricks you must be aware of before choosing your audio and web conferencing partners

Pete Bennett is a serial entrepreneur and founder of of Ozone Conferencing in the UK, which provides audio and web conferencing services to organisations as diverse as major banks, government departments, universities, ladies knitting circles and boy scouts.

Unlike Remington’s Victor Kiam who famously liked his shaver so much he ‘bought the company’, Bennett hated the conference company he was using so much that he decided to set up his own!

During the call he’ll be sharing some of the practices which conferencing companies can use to inflate their profits at your expense and providing you with simple countermeasures to ensure you get the best deal – whoever you choose as your supplier.

Typical Feedback: Great practical advice on the things to look out for when choosing virtual working technology.

Gareth Kane: Sustainability and Virtual Working

Enlightened companies are finding that a robust green reputation can help them win new business, recruit and retain better staff and cut costs. Virtual working has a huge potential to cut carbon emissions through reduced business travel, which can account for 25% of many companies’ carbon footprint. Sustainability consultant and author Gareth Kane (www.terrainfirma.co.uk) will discuss how virtual working can cut carbon emissions and how those benefits can be sold to your clients, employees and the general public. His book ‘The Three Secrets of Green Business’ was published by Earthscan in 2009.

Typical Feedback: I found Gareth’s talk really interesting, both in terms of the main content and little snippets I picked up, Thank you Gareth and Penny.

Elizabeth Harrin: Social Media and Virtual Teams

You probably already have a raft of techniques to manage your virtual team, so what value can social media tools add? In this session, Elizabeth Harrin (www.pm4girls.co.uk) will look at the different types of social media tools that can help you keep your team on the same page, such as wikis. We’ll also look at four challenges of managing virtual teams and how social media tools can address these.

Join this session and cut through the hype about social media: it won’t solve all the problems of working with virtual teams, but this overview will give you an insight into how you can tap into new technology to equip yourself for managing teams in the 21st Century.

Elizabeth is the author of ‘Project Management in the Real World’ and is has just finished a book on social media for project managers.

Typical Feedback: Elizabeth Harrin was excellent! Would listen again to her. The talk has triggered several ideas about keeping every one informed.

Lothar Katz: Negotiating Internationally

In formal contract negotiations and informal team discussions, international collaboration frequently requires negotiating and influencing across distances, time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences. The challenges are considerable. How do you reach agreement with a foreign client without giving away too much value? How do you steer your faraway project team’s decisions without burning bridges and losing allies? How can you overcome emotional barriers and pushback from a foreign colleague? And most importantly, how is any of this done when you cannot meet the person face to face?

In this call, author and international negotiation expert Lothar Katz (www.leadershipcrossroads.com) explores conceptual, cultural, ethical, and practical aspects of remote business negotiations. He also discusses the limitations of negotiating virtually, which with some cultures can be hard and even impossible to do successfully. Author of “Negotiating International Business”

Typical Feedback: I thought Lothar Katz was exceptionally inspiring and would like to hear him again. Lothar Katz with the intercultural hints was great to listen to.

Penny Pullan: Conference Calls Made Easy

Penny will give you a whole range of hints and tips to help you make your calls even more effective. Starting from the moment you decide to meet by conference call, right through to when the call is over and actions need to be done, you’ll hear horror stories from other people and how you can avoid the pitfalls they faced.

Typical Feedback: I found the session on practical conference calls very useful. I liked the specific practical tips provided.