Global Operations Management: The Agent Of Connection

21st Century Global Operations Management

In this fast-paced global economy, the quality of your global operations management and how adept you are at continually increasing your intellectual project management global bandwidth will keep your organization’s bottom line ahead of the competition. Being a global leader is no longer an option – it is now a requirement for managing global teams and maintaining a strong and secure place in the global marketplace.

Here Yael talks about her view regarding this key role that virtual managers play in global operations management:

These challenges are not daunting to the effective virtual manager- they provoke innovation in them. The conditions that spark innovation arise from connecting the right people, ideas and environment at the right time. In a business environment of great uncertainty and rapid change, organizational capability fuels an organization’s strategic options. By organizational capacity we mean the quality of its people resources, the flexibility of its infrastructure, and the openness of its culture, all of which form the basis for success in the Age of Connection.

For over a decade, Yael Zofi has believed global operations management is less about controlling and managing and more about creating and enabling connection. Instead of the ‘Agent of Change,’ responsible for managing change and transition, the new role of the 21st Century leader is about connection; hence the ‘Agent of Connection’ – connecting the team members to you and to each other.

Video Transcript:

“Connection is the underlying concept in the book. It’s really the river that flows through the book because technology and all the elements of virtual teams are things that anybody can access.

Connection is something that’s the key role of the virtual manager in global operations management. We used to say agent of change, you need to be managing the change, managing transitions. Nowadays it’s more about connecting the team members to you, connecting the team members to each other and that’s a paradigm shift in leadership because it requires the manager to give up to get more leadership. So it’s a more shared role. It’s more of involving the team members. It’s something that enables everybody to connect despite the fact that they’re not in the same time zone; they’re not in the same workspace. My belief is that the role of the leader of the today and of the future is not to try to control and manage, but rather try to connect, interact, and integrate their team.”