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AMY C. EDMONDSON
DAVID L. AGER
EMILY HARBURG
NATALIE BARTLETT
Teaming at Disney Animation
Disney Animation produces entertaining films enjoyed worldwide and also happens to be a first-class
Studio for technological advancement. Producing animation is a fantastically complicated blend of art and
science and it requires many coordinated experiments to create. We view all of the 900 Artists, Engineers, and
Scientists in our studio as filmmakers and each has a creative part to play in the process.
— Andy Hendrickson, Chief Technology Officer, Disney Animation
Jonathan Geibel, Director of Systems at Walt Disney Animation Studios (hereafter referred to as
Disney Animation), walked through the workspace occupied by the group he had been tasked to
lead. Geibel knew he was part of a creative and magical environment. The Disney studio had created
more than 53 feature animated films in over three-quarters of a century—beginning with Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through to Frozen, released in November 2013 and awarded the Oscar for
Best Animated Feature in March 2014, the first Academy Award in that category for Walt Disney
Animation Studios. In late March 2014, Frozen became the highest-grossing animated feature,
worldwide, of all time. There was a period in the history of the 90-year-old studio, not so many years
ago (and prior to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull’s leadership), when Disney Animation had become
more structured and hierarchical, and it wasn’t always easy to work across departments to innovate.
Yet the work, which involved both high-tech computer animation and creative storytelling, was more
cross-disciplinary and dynamic than ever. Geibel wondered what he and Ron Johnson, whom he
hired and teamed up with to re-envision the Systems group within Disney Animation, could do to
improve the flow and the efficiency of the organization’s increasingly technical and creative work.
Geibel and Johnson had already made dramatic changes in the work structure and in the physical
space to promote the effective teamwork that was so essential to producing compelling, engaging,
animated films. Now it was time to figure out how well the changes were working and what further
changes, if any, were necessary.
Professor Amy C. Edmondson, Senior Fellow David L. Ager, independent researcher Emily Harburg, and Research Associate Natalie Bartlett
prepared this case. It was reviewed and approved before publication by a company designate. Funding for the development of this case was
provided by Harvard Business School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not
intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2014, 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-5457685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized,
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Background
The magic of Disney Animation had enchanted audiences for decades. Roy and Walt Disney
founded the company in 1923 in Burbank, California, creating Walt Disney Animation Studios
(known then as “The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio”). Initially, the company produced animated
short films and, in 1937, released the first full-length animated Hollywood feature film, Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs. With Walt Disney’s legendary talents as a storyteller and innovator, Disney
Animation continued to revolutionize feature film, from Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Dumbo to Cinderella,
Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book. In the late 1980s, a new generation of filmmakers, who had been
inspired by the studios’ earlier films, created such classics as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty & the
Beast, and The Lion King in a period often considered a renaissance for the studio. (Exhibit 1 shows
Walt Disney participating in an early storyboarding meeting.)
When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, CEO Bob Iger asked Pixar President Ed Catmull and Pixar
Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter to also take on leadership of Disney Animation. In 2007, as part
of their changes to their studio, Andy Hendrickson was hired as chief technology officer (CTO).
Under the guidance of Catmull and Lasseter and Disney Animation General Manager Andrew
Millstein, Hendrickson was tasked to transform the science of animation at Disney. The first step was
to find the right people to innovate a new culture.
In 2010, Hendrickson recruited Jonathan Geibel to join the team as the Director of Systems at
Disney Animation. Geibel had worked at Disney for 10 years, and had extensive experience on
technical teams as a Senior Systems Engineer and a Production Engineering Lead. Geibel expressed
interest in testing out new ways of working in his group, inspired by the vision set by the new
leaders. As he recalled, “[Catmull and Lasseter] came in and set up a new culture where leadership
was trusted; people felt trusted and empowered. They also promoted ‘failing quickly’—the idea that
there are both successes and failures when striving to innovate and the best thing is to try and have
your mistakes and learn from them early in the process. This new leadership sparked changes like
our new teaming structure.” Geibel set out to restructure his team by flattening the hierarchy. He
envisioned a dynamic organization with the agility of a startup company, breaking down traditional
silos, empowering engineers, and supporting experimentation.
Later that year, Geibel promoted Ron Johnson, who had worked at Disney Animation since 2007
as a Senior Systems Engineer, to Manager of Systems. Geibel and Johnson had spoken frequently
about management, and they shared similar beliefs about the operation and leadership of technical
teams. As Geibel explained, “We had both gone between being engineers and being managers of
engineers several times throughout our careers, and that back and forth allowed for a lot of learning
and perspective.”
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Animation—the technique of creating the illusion of movement from static figures—had a long
history. One of the first entirely animated films, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, appeared in 1906,
directed by James Blackton, who was considered the father of American animation.1 Since those early
days, animation technique had been dramatically transformed, with Disney Animation being one of
the leading innovators of this transformative process.
An animated feature at Disney began with stories that would resonate with audiences. Visual
breakdowns of story sequences were created. These “storyboards” illustrated the visual message,
emotion, and approximate timing of a scene in a form that was roughly described as a “comic book”
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Teaming at Disney Animation
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depiction of the film. The sequences were pitched, debated, and refined until the story was clear and
the next phase of image production began.
In hand-drawn animation, frames were drawn to depict the characters, props, and backgrounds of
a scene. Artists called animators created the look of substance and form, the appearance of cinematic
lighting, and the perspective of camera. Animators created slight variations of those drawings, which
were different from still-life paintings, to represent visual snapshots of a scene over time. Using the
multiplane camera, which was a Disney innovation, the drawings were then recorded in successive
frames of film. After developing, the film was projected onto a screen at the rate of 24 frames per
second, giving the illusion of movement and bringing the characters to life.
In the hand-drawn style of animation, there were many stages of the process as the drawings were
refined. Rough animation used pencils and tracing paper to block out the character movement and
timing. Animators often flipped between multiple drawings to gauge motion. In the early years of
hand-drawn animation, “in-betweening” and cleanup animation came next, where the rough pencil
sketches of major character poses were “filled in” with additional drawings to smooth transitions
between poses, and the rough pencil sketches were finalized with clean ink lines. The final ink lines
were painted onto transparent plastic “cels” that allowed for the subsequent step of painting in color.
Pinocchio, an example of this process, was created by a team that consisted of over 750 individuals,
each with a unique contribution.2
In the late 1980s, Disney Animation began to utilize computing to assist in the creation of
animation using the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS). CAPS allowed the handdrawn animation to be created as individual “pieces,” which were managed by the computer as
unique layers.3 Those pieces would be assembled, or composited, into a single image using the
repeatability and precision of a computer. CAPS brought Disney to the forefront of hand-drawn
technique, advancing from the multiplane camera with a digital computer equivalent, for
unprecedented levels of complexity depicted in the films. The Rescuers Down Under, released in 1990,
was the first animated feature to be made with CAPS.
In 2014, when Disney Animation created a film using computer animation, production started
with artists creating models built using computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that were cousins to
similar systems used in architecture and engineering. Those models were then applied to a
mathematical model skeleton. Animators breathed performance into character by animating the
model to move the animated figure in a scene.
Computer simulation had become omnipresent in animated features, creating such character
items as hair and cloth. For example, one of the most challenging aspects encountered in the making
of the film Tangled was ensuring that Rapunzel’s hair appeared natural and real. This required much
back-and-forth iteration between artists and technical engineers in order to develop tools that could
accurately represent the flow and movement of hair.
The current frontier used simulation to create cinematic lighting. The physics of photon transport
and responses to light energy by materials were captured in a mathematical model that Disney used
to represent the world of an animated feature. Artists used digital virtual equivalents of real stage
lights and theatrical techniques that mimicked the real world to create cinematic lighting.
Additionally, cameras were represented in digital scenes with realistically simulated parameters.
Every nuance was computer simulated, including lens distortion, chromatic aberration, and depth of
field. All of this simulation required an extraordinary amount of computing capability.
3
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Teaming at Disney Animation
By 2013, Disney Animation contained a 30,000-core computer cluster for simulation and lighting, 6
petabytes of data storage, a 1.5 megawatt data center, and over 1,800 Macintosh and Linux
workstations. Driving all of this capability were 900 highly skilled artists, engineers, and scientists
telling stories through words, music, and images with the most technologically advanced tools in the
world.
Disney Animation Systems Group Structure (prior to 2010)
After Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Catmull and Lasseter, along with Millstein, assumed
responsibility to lead Disney Animation. By 2014, Disney Animation comprised several departments.
The Technology department was headed by Hendrickson and included both Software and Systems
departments.
Prior to 2010, the 50-person Systems department was organized in traditional units, each
consisting of 15–20 technical staff. (Exhibit 2 illustrates a traditional team structure in the Systems
group.) Managers coordinated projects from their upstairs offices. Meetings were held one-on-one
with group members, and every few weeks the entire group met in a formal conference room. Final
technical decisions were often made by managers and implemented by group members. Individuals
were hired for a specific role or promoted from within. Top-down reorganizations were occasionally
made to accommodate changing technologies. At the time of these shifts, individuals were often
reassigned into new groups, reporting to a new manager.
Once individuals were assigned to groups, task boundaries were clearly drawn. Geibel reflected:
In the past, we rarely saw resources (budget or people) flow between silos, even
when it was obvious that moving resources to other areas was in the best interest of the
studio. The studio environment is highly dynamic and changes rapidly, and our
organizational structure was getting in the way of our ability to react to the changes.
After observing the situation for a few years, it became obvious why this was
happening. Managers were being judged by how effective their silos were performing. If
a manager gave away resources to another silo, they would have fewer resources to
accomplish their goals. This caused a mind-set for managers to hoard and protect these
resources throughout the year. The competition for resources became extremely
apparent during budget season when managers would fight with one another to obtain
the most resources they could for the goals they set out for the upcoming years.
It wasn’t just managers who felt the boundaries between groups. Jim Bette, a systems engineer,
explained, “It was very siloed, as in ‘this is our space, that is yours.’” Manager Matt Schnittker added,
“It felt like giving was a bad thing. You wanted to protect your domain and hold onto your
resources.”
Changes in Structure and Workspace
Geibel and Johnson began the transformation of the Systems group by seeking ideas from various
sources to guide their approach. For example, they were influenced by the work dynamic typical in
startup companies and management concepts such as the Matrix Model. Wary of large, sweeping
reorganizations that changed too many variables at the same time, they created their own approach
to transform the group. Geibel outlined the change process that Johnson and he finally adopted:
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Teaming at Disney Animation
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Our approach to change is based on principles of the scientific method.
Organizational changes are done methodically, with the intent to evolve over time. We
study and discuss current problems that exist in the organization. We make one change
at a time so that we know what worked, what did not work, with learning being at the
center. We observe how it affects the system, we gauge its impact, we learn, we generate
another theory, and debate the results. If something works, we do more of it. If
something does not work, we learn from it and try something different. Everyone is
involved in the process, not just management. Our technical staff members are
contributing just as many ideas as the management team. We try to ensure critical
thinking is happening at all levels. If you think a process could be made better, we
encourage people to speak up, offer new ideas, run experiments, and share the results.
The same art of experimentation and problem solving that happens on technical
problems is now being applied to evolving the way we organize ourselves and build
teams.
One of the first theories they tested was the use of small autonomous teams to break the formation
of previously established groups, with each team focused on a particular specialty. The teams would
be responsible for specific tasks or problems that arose in the studio, for example, networking and
technical support. There were many questions related to size, structure, and composition. Geibel,
together with Johnson, engaged in a series of experiments. For example, Geibel explained:
We set up a weekly hour-long leads meeting, which we intentionally made optional
so each week we’d have a different number of people in the room. Some of the most
interesting moments happened during meetings where people would stagger in at
different times. We noticed in the jump from six to seven participants the quality of the
discussions dropped dramatically and often people would go silent. We saw that
happen over and over and came up with the idea not to have more than six people in
the room when we were having a working meeting.
Geibel concluded that their organization should consist of small, autonomous teams of two to six
people, and began by selectively assigning employees to various “specialty” teams.
Shortly thereafter, Geibel and Johnson observed that employees were confused about who was
coordinating the work and how to allocate their time. This led them to define clear roles for team
members. Each team would consist of a lead and several primary members, and occasionally would
also comprise a few secondary members. (Exhibit 3 presents a sample team and role assignment grid.)
Team Leads
The teams would be headed by a team lead, someone who had been identified as a technical
subject-matter expert and who had demonstrated a strong vision for the area. Geibel created a twopage lead doctrine, shown in Exhibit 4, outlining expectations for those in a lead role. He explained:
We’re not going to be rewarding them for sitting in an office and dictating orders.
The lead is not administrative in nature. They’re doing the work alongside of everyone
else and leading by example. Hopefully 80% of their job is doing the work and 20% is
establishing a vision and evangelizing their ideas to key stakeholders across the studio.
The goals of the leads were to be transparent with their ideas and to be open to feedback
from their peers and management. It is not mandatory to execute on any or every piece
of feedback, regardless of the source; it’s up to the lead and the team to decide which
ideas are best to move forward on.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Bert Faerstain, a member of the Media Engineering Team and team lead of the Displays Working
Group, explained:
I head up the displays working group for the studio. I have substantial background
and interest in this area and many of my coworkers already knew that this was my
hobby for years. I research this world in my spare time outside of work, so it’s my
passion and they knew this. My team and I are tasked with continually advancing our
display standards for the studio, while weighing options to balance our requirements,
the direction technology is headed, and overall value.
Catmull had inspired the idea of having team leads through his “director-driven studio” model,
where an individual was in charge of the story, pitching to peers for voluntary feedback that their
teams would sort through to look for new ideas to help propel their films forward. Storytelling was
in the hands of the filmmakers themselves.
Whenever new technologies would emerge that required the formation of a new team, Geibel or
Johnson would approach the broader group with the opportunity to lead the new team. They would
then look for the person who had the most compelling vision and whom they felt could effectively
drive a team forward, regardless of his or her current title. Titles played very little role in deciding
team leads. Geibel and Johnson wanted to generate the best ideas and to execute on them.
The creation of the team lead position offered technical individuals the opportunity to move up
within the company. Technical team leads enjoyed the same status and compensation as the
traditional “personnel” managers. Engineer Jim Bette described how this change affected his career
growth motivation:
Now I feel like you don’t have to be in management to move up—you’re all more on
the same playing field; it’s more based on what you bring to the table. You don’t have to
be a manager; you can be a technical lead, and technical leads are now considered the
top of the organization. This has freed up a lot for the managers—managers can
maintain people’s career growth, handle reviews, and make sure people have what they
need.
Primary and Secondary Team Members
Employees could also be assigned as primary or secondary members to specific teams. Every
employee played a primary role on one team and had the option of playing secondary roles for any
number of teams. Employees were expected to focus most of their time and effort on their primary
team and help out, when needed, on those teams to which they had been assigned as secondary
members. As Johnson explained:
Secondary players helped us to tap into peoples’ other skills and passions across the
organization. We wanted to enable everyone to utilize all of their skills, whether it was a
specific technical skill or a soft skill. Sometimes we’d add a secondary player to a team
simply because they asked good questions and got the team thinking differently. Other
times people were brought onto teams because of their attention to detail or project
management abilities. Whatever the various teams needed, we could often find someone
with a specific skill somewhere in the organization to augment the teams with. People
seem to want to have secondary roles and to help other teams, which is great, but it is
always expected that your primary team is where your first responsibility lies.
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In the previous structure, team members worked only in the areas supervised by their managers.
As Geibel explained:
We had network engineers who had a passion for software development. We had
Windows systems administrators who also happened to have skills in database
administration. We had a systems engineer who also had a passion for mobile software
development. In the old organization we would have had to pick one of these skills and
now we can leverage all of them. It’s very motivating for our staff to know that they can
contribute to and be a part of so many different areas across the organization.
To avoid problems found in matrix organizations, such as employees feeling conflicted about
demands among competing managers, the use of primary and secondary designations established
expectations that held employees accountable first to their primary team. Team leads understood
these expectations, and never battled over the time of an engineer who might be playing a secondary
role on the team but was primary on another team. Team members liked the opportunity to manage
their own time across multiple teams and pick areas they were passionate about.
Geibel and Johnson spent considerable time on team membership issues, but this did not
guarantee performance. Geibel explained, “One year, a new team member joined a very highperforming team, where everyone knew each other very well. By adding this team member, the work
dynamics on the team changed drastically. I provided a great deal of feedback to the individual, and
made sure we allowed enough time to try and make the personalities gel, but we eventually had to
pull them off the team.” Johnson reflected on the decision to pull the person off the team: “You have
to be very creative in these moments not to punish that person. It’s all about finding the right fit. With
new people coming in, we move them around and find the most effective place for them.”
Other Structural Changes
Geibel and Johnson applied the same teaming structure to their own management team, creating a
small six-person management group made up of a diverse set of managers who were passionate
about engineering and business operations and who trusted and respected each other. Because the
team leads were responsible for creating a vision and running day-to-day operations for their areas,
the managers were able to focus on career and team coaching and technology investment strategies.
Managers were expected to lead by example and spend at least 20% of their time being hands-on.
Geibel and Johnson found that the best way to earn the respect of employees was by working
alongside them. This also helped ensure a connection to what was happening “on the floor.” The
management team also acted like a venture capital firm, deciding which technologies merited
investment of both dollars and staff time, and setting expectations for each team, so as to align team
goals with the broader direction of the studio and the vision of the CTO.
Geibel and Johnson proceeded to experiment with other aspects of the team, such as the location
of team members. Geibel described an early experiment:
We created a small team with a specific scope and selected a few people to be on the
team. We relocated their workspaces so that they were proximate to one another.
Suddenly, conversations were flowing; people were more engaged and more focused on
the topic. . . . Everyone heard what was going on in real time and they began to engage
in ad hoc brainstorming sessions together. Permanent whiteboards were used to help in
the exchange of ideas, and most formal meetings were abandoned since communication
happened organically.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Shortly thereafter, Geibel and Johnson started to reconfigure the entire workspace for the Systems
department so that teams were collocated. Casual meeting spaces were embedded in technical areas
so that teams never had to schedule or relocate to formal conference rooms to engage in discussions.
Geibel asserted:
Conference rooms don’t work for most meetings or discussions. When there’s a large
formal conference table, there’s a psychological effect that happens. People are
programmed to walk in and stay quiet in these rooms and listen to the person sitting at
the head of the table. They shut down. With enough reinforcement we can probably get
over that, but it’s going to take a long time so we don’t use conference rooms for
anything.
Patrick Danford, the lead of the Media Engineering team, described how the changes had affected
the work of his group: “When you are all sitting together, that works really well. . . . E-mail is not the
best way to get information when it needs to happen fast.”
Geibel described the behavioral changes in the group after changing the office setup:
Collocating individuals allowed ideas to flow each day through ad hoc meetings.
Individuals would often brainstorm, pause, and walk over to a whiteboard for further
development rather than needing to arrange a specific time and space to meet. With
high priority and chaotic work, physical proximity was key.
Geibel and Johnson also wanted to improve the communication to the managers in the group.
They decided to give up their offices, which were located away from their staff. They moved to
workspaces in the center of the Systems area. Since they no longer had offices with doors, they
decided to convert one of the former offices into a shared meeting area where they could conduct
confidential meetings and one-on-ones with their staff.
The new structure enabled Geibel and Johnson to conduct frequent walkabouts to tour the office
and check in on teams, and it enabled communication to happen in real time. If something was going
on, they would know about it immediately. Decisions began to happen in real time; all forms of
formal status reports, update meetings, and formal communication channels were no longer required
to keep everyone up to date.
Teams changed dynamically as the needs of the studio changed, without requiring a traditional
top-down reorganization. As new technologies emerged, Geibel would announce the prospect for a
new team within the Systems department. He would look for the staff that had the best ideas and
strongest vision for how to integrate the new technology. Often this person would become team lead.
Over time, resources were reallocated to the areas where they were most needed and away from
older technologies. Frequent opportunities to move forward onto newer and more exciting projects
meant that employees would rarely hold onto or protect resources assigned to soon-to-be-obsolete
technologies.
The use of short-term teams was not uncommon. Teams created on the fly were often formed
around a specific problem. For example, the studio unexpectedly hired 200 additional artists. Geibel
announced that the Systems department needed to temporarily increase the staffing on its frontline
technical support team to accommodate the sudden increase in demand for their services. Within
hours, he had a multitude of volunteers, each of whom had already talked with their own team leads
to postpone other projects. The technical support team was doubled in size within 24 hours. As
Geibel reflected, “We had senior-level engineers jumping in for a few months to handle frontline
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Teaming at Disney Animation
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calls. We’ve strived to create an organization that is less title-centric and more collaborative in nature.
If there’s a team that needs help and you have the necessary skills to assist, then we highly encourage
everyone jumping in and supporting each other.” Yet, when they had first implemented the small
autonomous team concept, Johnson looked at the new organization with concern, “Did we just build
14 new silos?”
Team Meetings
Geibel and Johnson’s goal in instituting small teams had been to foster informal communication.
Working groups met only as needed, although some teams had established a regular standing
meeting every second week, lasting no more than one hour. Meetings were generally focused on
solving problems or meeting with key stakeholders or (internal) customers from other parts of the
studio. Often, it was not possible to address all items in a single meeting. As Johnson explained,
“There’s more work than can possibly get done . . . and that’s okay as long as we identify the highimpact issues and prioritize them appropriately.” The team decided its own prioritization of items.
Occasionally, the upcoming release of a film could bump items higher. As Faerstain explained:
The team is generally in agreement about what we need to tackle. We really
challenge one another in order to reach agreement. We keep discussing it and hitting it
until there is agreement. If there is no progress, we shelve it or figure out a way to bring
more data back to the next meeting, at which time we will adjudicate what we should
do. This, though, is very rare.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the team was often left with a list of tasks that required action.
Individuals within the team volunteered to own specific items from the list. Faerstain explained, “It is
valued when someone grabs something and runs with it.” (Exhibit 5 shows a meeting in the Systems
Department.)
Additionally, Geibel conducted a Systems staff meeting every other week. He used the meeting to,
among other things, broadcast all major events within the studio. This was an open forum to ask
about and discuss the major projects occurring in the studio at large and a forum where teams could
update everyone on their major projects and milestones that had been met. (Exhibit 6 presents a
picture of the Systems Department at Disney Animation.)
A New Approach to Communication
Aside from meetings, Geibel and Johnson thought all work should be accessible to any team
member. They asked each team to create a yearly road map for their goals. The road maps were
broadcasted to the entire Systems team. Anyone who disagreed could talk to that team lead.
Additionally, Geibel and Johnson created a master calendar to show major milestones throughout the
year. This calendar was situated on two large whiteboards in a main hallway. Each team used
different colored Post-it notes to show major events. If something changed, team members would
walk out to the main hallway, remove the Post-it note, and replace it with a new one.
Marc Jordan, an engineer in the technology group, commented:
It’s a very collaborative environment and I feel empowered that I can make decisions
that will impact the studio. I also feel that it is my personal responsibility to make sure
the right people are consulted and the right communication takes place. This is
personally what I have always really wanted. . . . The sense of empowerment coupled
with the sense of responsibility to make things happen.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Geibel also looked to change the way they communicated with their customers, also referred to as
clients, who included the production and post-production groups. Jordan commented:
The personalities of the technical folks are very different from those working on the
show: the artists. Not only that, but our areas of expertise are very different, so how you
influence them and they you, how well you communicate what is important and make
sure you are getting heard on the other side is critical to your success.
Although they acknowledged these “technical” differences, Geibel and Johnson had to interact
with these client groups using the same informal approach they had implemented in their own
teams. In addition to collaborating in hallways and on an ad hoc basis, e-mail and texting were
frequent methods of communication, allowing team leads to manage direct contact with the client to
which they had been assigned. Berenice Robinson, the vice president of Post-Production, recalled that
while working on the mixing stage, she would text the visual effects supervisor to make sure she had
the right shot. She stated, “It is the immediate response that I can get for communication to save me
time and money.”
Geibel and Johnson frequently approached customers’ desks to engage in conversations about
technology. Hank Driskill, Technical Supervisor for Production, referred to this as a “social
engineering exercise” that linked the artists to those in charge of running the machines. He described,
“You could pick up the phone and call, rather than sending an e-mail to a system.” Geibel tried to
bring this information to his clients right away to set technological expectations. Jordan commented:
If you aren’t afraid to be honest about a bug or a feature that is going to take three
weeks to happen, this serves to build trust. They trust us enough to tell us their issues
and they trust that we won’t freak out. On the flip side, if we say there’s an issue, it is
incumbent upon us to figure out how to solve the problem. We can’t say we aren’t
meeting the solution too many times; that won’t work. You need to deliver on the
promises you make.
Not everyone thought full transparency was a good idea. Geibel reported:
There was one moment where a team member thought we were being too
transparent to our customers. He thought we should create two e-mail lists, one for the
customer, one for us. This was a moment that we all sat there and rethought, “Is this
wrong? Are we going to alienate customers if they see all the problems we are working
on? Ultimately, we chose open communication.”
Changes in Work Process
Geibel had introduced a work process to his teams that was based on the approach that film
artists used. This process, referred to as “dailies,” required artists to show their ongoing work
product to directors or peers. This “creative refinement” process had long been practiced in the
motion picture industry, where demonstrations and showings were king. Geibel described a recent
screening of a segment of an animated film to illustrate how the process worked:
All kinds of people were invited to sit in and take notes on the film and share their
creative notes with the “owner.” It is up to the owner to decide what to do with the
notes. There is fearlessness in giving notes. It was interesting the first time we invited
technology folks to the screening. We thought we would get a bunch of notes about the
technical aspects of the film. Instead, these folks wrote about their level of engagement
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Teaming at Disney Animation
615-023
with the characters, the effectiveness of the story arc, and the realness of the
relationships between the characters in the film.
Hendrickson commented on the process, “There is only so much theorizing that can be done. You
need to build, draw, make . . . and we expect it to be less than 100% the first time. If something comes
out 100% right the first time, you aren’t trying hard enough.” The approach had received widespread
acceptance throughout the team. It was not uncommon for a group of “techies” to be found
presenting software enhancements to a group of artists, with the latter providing comments and
feedback, sometimes of a very technical nature.
Experimentation
Teams were expected to generate multiple ideas and test different approaches to address a
problem or exploit an opportunity. As one team member explained, “Geibel or Johnson might
respond to a new idea by saying ‘Well, that’s a good idea, go make that happen!’”
Hendrickson, the CTO, explained:
The only time you fail is when you don’t try! There is a grand series of different
experiments we run every day. Many organizations undertake R&D but rarely conduct
organizational experiments. We feel today’s workforce wants something different from
the strict hierarchies of the 1960s office worker. We view the team dynamic as an
organizational experiment. We try something. Did we achieve the expected outcome?
What did we learn from it? Let’s move on organizationally. It’s all about trying
experiments. What did you predict? What happened? How will you fix it? What will
you do next?
When I came here, things were very rigid. There was lots of blaming going on. I
think about making great technology as my success factor. Problem solving brings
me . . . us . . . happiness. My art is keeping the lab and experimentation and balancing
these against deadlines.
Experimentation by one group of employees led to the creation of Coda, an in-house queuing
system for managing render-compute jobs for artists. Jordan explained that, when in need of a new
queuing system, someone asked, “How hard would it be to write our own system?” The team
decided to give it a try. Geibel and Johnson were onboard, encouraging the formation of a Coda
team. The team began by holding informal gatherings with four to five people, brainstorming how
the new system should work. With an idea, one team member would then mock it up. Jordan
remarked:
The members of the team were very comfortable with each other. It was not
uncommon for someone out of the blue to say, “I have an idea. Let’s meet.” Next thing
you knew, three or four people were sitting on couches in a common space, marking up
whiteboards. We spoke our minds. No one’s ideas were dismissed. People could say
anything, regardless of how stupid they thought their idea was. Even if you were called
on your idea, you didn’t take it personally. We trusted one another and knew that the
comment was not personal but was intended to help the team make progress on an
issue.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
The physical proximity of Coda team members proved to aid in the experimentation process as
well as to create the real-time, informal communication found in startup companies. If someone
overheard a conversation and had something to contribute, he or she might join in part of the
conversation and then go back to work. As Jordan explained, “I might walk across the hall to talk to
Scott about something in Coda I am looking at, Kevin in between might overhear me and stick his
head in to contribute to what is going on or he might yell something out the door. It helps that we are
physically proximate; otherwise you would not know what is happening.”
Geibel and Johnson found themselves frequently reminding team members that failure simply
meant that one had unexpected results. As engineer Michael McClure explained, “I think we’re
transparent enough that if there’s a failure, [Geibel and Johnson] want to investigate and dig into this.
They want to look into it and they think it’s almost cool. Maybe we catch failures early and minds are
changed?” Therefore, they encouraged learning new ideas that resulted in unexpected results and
reporting failures in order to catch mistakes early. As Johnson avowed, “All failures have a silver
lining somewhere. If we failed, we have learned something new.”
Taking a Backseat
Geibel and Johnson tried to interfere with teams as little as possible. One employee noted:
There is trust that we will grab on to interesting projects to get involved in, and by
our interest we will want to do a good job without being told we have to do it. This
allows them to “oversee” us individually, without having to get into the nuts and bolts
of what it is we are doing—which is somewhat a waste of their time; there is no need for
them to have to know how or what we do, as long as the needs of the community are
being met. Of course, there is technical know-how on both their parts, so they are
familiar with the work going on, but they don’t have to know it all.
Geibel, Johnson, and the rest of the Systems Management Team met each week to discuss how
they thought each team was operating. If something was not working well or a team was not
delivering on its goals, the management team discussed the situation. Then, the manager of the lead
of the team stepped in to fix the problem, working with the lead to brainstorm how to do this.
Johnson described the approach:
When a team is failing to perform, our goal is to quickly identify the root cause of the
dysfunction. This requires trial and error. Sometimes we change one element of the
system, such as moving one person off the team and substituting someone in their place.
Sometimes this works. When it doesn’t, we will continue to make changes to the team
until the root cause has been identified and the team is functioning at a high level.
McClure remarked, from the perspective of employees, “Shuffling goes on periodically. It’s not
earth shattering when it does. It’s not about blowing up teams, but it is about [Johnson] and [Geibel]
spending time studying what everyone in the team is good at, what they are passionate about, and
trying to match skill set of the job to the skill set of the person.”
Getting the teams to work effectively took a lot of Geibel’s and Johnson’s time and effort.
Sometimes it required well-honed conversational skills and patience. Johnson recalled:
One time there was a team member who seemed really frustrated, and other team
members seemed to be taking it personally. [Geibel] asked the team member, “How are
you feeling?” and he ended up saying that he hadn’t been sleeping because his child
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Teaming at Disney Animation
615-023
was staying up all night. It was helpful to know what was going on, because we can all
be quick to internalize negative emotions and take it as our fault, when it might be a
totally disconnected reason.
A Work in Progress
Geibel hoped to instill a culture in which technical teams had total autonomy, so long as their
work got done. In the initial experiments, team members were instructed to choose their hours, attire,
office arrangements, project management methodologies, team meeting structure, and more. Despite
these instructions, some engineers continued to ask for permission to make changes such as moving
desks around in the office. He might respond by saying, “What do you think? What is best for your
team? What is best for your customers?” Geibel commented on the difficulty of instilling autonomy:
We’ve built teams where technical leads don’t have to ask for permission to change
the way they are running their teams. We placed them in their roles because we felt they
were the experts in their area and best suited to understanding what’s best for their
customers. We’re still working on people thinking that way spontaneously. The culture
is ingrained in everybody because the average tenure is 15–40 years. If you’ve worked in
a top-down organization for that long, it’s going to take a while to adapt to a new
culture where everyone is expected to challenge the status quo and where there’s an
expectation that critical thinking is happening at all levels.
Geibel and Johnson continued to experiment with approaches to communication. One idea was to
build an internal Twitter-like communication tool, where each team could “tweet” certain problems
or solutions. Johnson explained the idea:
One of the problems we encounter is how to foster cross-team learning. Playing off of
current social media concepts, we came up with an idea to create an internal microblogging or tweeting system. Whenever an engineer has an idea, an “aha” moment, they
could “tweet” about it internally and other people can follow their favorite topics and
comment in real time.
Another idea was to host forums with interview-style sessions, where experts asked and
answered questions. Geibel wanted to pursue this idea as a method of exploring broader topics and
engaging larger audiences without charging leads with the task of creating complex, formal
presentations.
Johnson also proposed a remodel of individual offices into group workspaces. Conversations with
employees had generated both positive and negative reactions. Some saw this as a method for
increased sharing, communication, and collaboration, while others saw it as a loss of personal space,
the loss of the ability to “hide” when feeling annoyed, and the loss of the ability to shut out noise,
especially when trying to think carefully about the solution to a complex problem. Many predicted
that employees would begin to wear headphones in the office as a result. In keeping with the
scientific method, Geibel and Johnson ran one experiment to eliminate the walls and offices in one
eight-person engineering pod, finding that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. Yet, they were
unsure of whether this approach was appropriate for every team. Geibel explained:
In an ideal scenario, we would use different office space layouts to optimize what’s
best for each team or individual, instead of using office space as a status symbol. In
traditional organizations, people with higher titles would get larger private offices and
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Teaming at Disney Animation
others might be placed in cubicles. Instead, we’d like to remove the status element. If
someone is an extreme introvert and is highly sensitive to noise, then maybe that
employee gets a private office so we are getting the most out of them. We also try not to
separate management from employees. In our opinion, managers of all levels should be
central to where the most activity is taking place and not hidden away in a remote
private office.
Additionally, the management team engaged in interesting debates on measuring success, hoping
to remove metrics that might produce “wrong behaviors.” Geibel stated, “Our focus is highly
relationship driven instead of data or metrics driven. We try to measure success by the strength of
our relationships with key customers and stakeholders, which we measure on a day-to-day basis by
walking around and being present.” Geibel and Johnson encountered this issue when working with
the Technical Support Group, where the number of tickets (reports based on a particular issue)
measured success. This encouraged employees to fulfill tickets that took little time and effort, and
avoid larger, more complicated issues.
Finally, Johnson and Geibel had talked to each other about the possibility of eliminating position
titles within the group, just as they had eliminated the traditional hierarchy. Geibel explained:
The world is based on titles and hierarchy. With our new organization, we’ve started
to break down those walls. When we build new teams, we staff them with the people
with the best ideas, regardless of their titles. We never want our staff to feel limited by
what their title is. We want to unleash the full potential of every employee, allowing
them to apply their skills in every way possible without bounds, and our new
organization provides the flexibility to do just this. We also don’t want people to
undervalue or overvalue ideas based on the title of the person with the idea.
Titles were useful for publicly recognizing employees who had done great work, or for motivating
employees based on salary levels. At the same time, people could box themselves in with titles.
Geibel said, “People tend to be motivated by having great people to work with, challenging problems
to work on, and being given the ability to do that, and feeling like we value what they contribute.
That’s really what motivates most of the people that work on their team. Now how do we come up
with a compensation package for that? It’s all relative.” Geibel added, “Emotionally, this could
represent a very big win, but it could be one of the dumbest decisions I’ve made in a long time.”
How could Geibel and Johnson instill autonomy in the new teams? Would employees accept
working in a shared environment? How would they measure success? What should they do about
titles? Ready for their next walk around to the various teams, Geibel and Johnson looked out from
their central location within the dynamic office environment they had created, glanced back at their
full Post-it note calendar on the wall, and considered the impact of the recent and impending changes
of their teaming model on Disney Animation’s performance.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Exhibit 1
615-023
Walter Elias Disney in a Storyboard Meeting for Grasshopper and the Ants (1933)
(L to R) Webb Smith, Ted Sears, (?), Walter Elias Disney, Pinto Colvig, Bill Cottrell (obstructed), and Albert Hurter.
Source:
Walt Disney Company.
Exhibit 2
Source:
Traditional Teaming Structure
Walt Disney Company.
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615-023
Teaming at Disney Animation
Exhibit 3
Source:
New Teaming Structure
Walt Disney Company.
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Exhibit 4
615-023
The Lead Doctrine
Systems Lead Role Expectations, v1.3.0
TIME COMMITMENT: The below responsibilities should only account for at most 20% of the lead’s time.
General
▪
Responsible for the ultimate success of the team
▪
Responsible for the day-to-day operation of the team
▪
Primary team members should be getting direction from their leads on a day-to-day basis
▪
Responsible for building the right team with the right players
▪
Responsible for building the right teaming area
▪
Responsible for coordinating team hours & schedules, including vacation time and coordinating
coverage for outages
▪
Responsible for maintaining the list of projects, tasks and core responsibilities of the team as well as
who owns what
▪
Responsible for pitching and defending budget items within the Systems organization as well as
tracking spends throughout the year for their area
▪
Responsible for rallying the troops and taking ownership of large issues in real-time
▪
Expected to not be yes-people
▪
Expected to challenge the norm. If you don’t like a policy or procedure, or think something could
be done better, challenge it, no matter whose policy it is.
▪
Expected to not become a status monger
▪
Expected to have a strong opinion for topics within their area and be able to voice and defend their
opinions in group forums
▪
Expected to share information transparently and openly
Awareness
▪
Team members: leads should have a thorough understanding of what each primary member of
their teams are focused on every day.
▪
Top problems: leads should have a thorough understanding of the top issues in their team day-today
▪
Major projects: leads should have a thorough understanding of where their top projects stand dayto-day
Technical Ability
▪
Expected to be an expert in the disciplines owned by the team
▪
Expected to stay on top of industry trends for their area
▪
Responsible for the development of short-term and long-term technical roadmaps for their area
▪
Makes final technical decision if team does not reach consensus
▪
Engages and drives technical debates
Evangelism/External Communication
▪ Ensure customers and key stakeholders are kept in the loop on all projects and team direction,
especially during major changes in technical direction
▪ Evangelizes team philosophies and strategic technical direction to key partners in the studio
▪ Connect with peer technologists outside of Disney to share technical innovations and complex
problems
▪ Work with management team to negotiate getting the resources you need to be successful and to
assist with removing obstacles for the team
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615-023
Teaming at Disney Animation
Team Meetings/Internal Communication
▪ Drives team meetings, selects pertinent topics to discuss
▪ Ensures that all team members have had a chance to voice their opinions on critical subject matters,
especially during large strategic decisions
▪ Ensures new and incoming projects/tasks are talked about
▪ Ensures meetings stay focused on helping each other solve current technical issues or talking about
the future and upcoming projects
▪ Ensures that meetings do not become a forum for generic status updates
▪ Maintains calendar of major milestones over the next 12-months
▪ Prioritizes projects/tasks and communicates to customers when projects are put on hold due to
lack of resources.
Best Practices
Engineering: ensuring that basic engineering practices are being followed
▪ Finding root cause, using scientific method, etc.
▪ Making the call to leave the studio in a broken state for the sake of problem solving to find the
root cause of an issue
Project Management: ensuring that our core project management philosophies are being met
▪ Gather requirements, talk to users, build a matrix of options, evangelize and debate, build
milestones, execute plan
Questions that Leads should be asking themselves and constantly evaluating
▪ For each Service or product:
o Are we supporting the product well?
o Do we speak intelligently about it?
o Do we have a good short-term and long-term roadmap?
o Are we keeping up with or leading the industry?
o Do we have good coverage for the service?
▪ For current projects or large tasks:
o Is there a clear owner?
o Are we making progress?
o Do we have a good strategy?
o Does the team have a good balance between talking about future ideas, engineering new
solutions and handling support/maintenance tasks?
What a lead is not directly responsible for (although welcome to participate, if desired):
Source:
o
Personnel issues
o
Final yearly reviews (may provide input for manager)
o
Promotions/Titles (may provide input for manager)
o
Formal budget presentations
o
Career management
o
Executive briefings
o
Organizational structures
Walt Disney Company.
18
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Teaming at Disney Animation
Exhibit 5
Source:
Teaming in the Systems Department (2013)
Walt Disney Company.
Exhibit 6
Source:
615-023
The Systems Department (2013)
Walt Disney Company.
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615-023
Teaming at Disney Animation
Endnotes
1 Howard Beckerman, Animation: The Whole Story (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), p. 16.
2 Carnegie Mellon University, “Animation,” Carnegie Mellon University Website,
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/462_s07/19_keyframing.pdf, accessed December 2013.
3 Animation World Network, “Producing Animation: The 3G CGI Production Process,” Animation World Network Website,
http://www.awn.com/animationworld/producing-animation-3d-cgi-production-process, accessed December 2013.
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9-409-003
REV: JULY 15, 2020
TSEDAL NEELEY
THOMAS J. DELONG
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun
Microsystems, Inc. (A)
Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun), slumped on the edge of his bed in
the company’s corporate flat in Paris. He struggled to even move after only three hours of sleep.
His mind kept replaying the events that had launched him into the whirlwind trip across the world.
Six days earlier, he was sitting at Sun’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California when he opened a string
of e-mails forwarded to him by his teammates. A crisis had erupted on his customer implementation
team. It was the second time that the team had failed to respond promptly to a customer’s system
outage. The lapses were in direct violation of a service contract agreement. So with only a few hours’
notice, he had set out from California to meet with each of the team’s 45 members spread across India,
France, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States (US). France was the last leg. James had
begun this trip assuming he would find a swift resolution to the rapidly escalating customer situation.
Unfortunately, that had not been the case.
James knew that if he could just make it to the gym, exercise would invigorate him and clear his
head: “Five more minutes and then I’ll go.” Twenty minutes later, still in his room, he grabbed his
laptop and launched his e-mail.
Re: HS Holdings
James scanned his inbox, reliving the events that had plunged him into this predicament. The
messages showed Rahul Ashok, service manager for the Mumbai team, discussing the source of the
breakdown with another Mumbai team member, Praveen Devilal. Santa Clara team members Nick
Elliott and Robert Chan were part of the back-and-forth as well:
To:
Fw:
Date:
From:
To:
Greg James (Global Manager, Santa Clara)
FYI in re: HS Holdings
Mon, 26 May 2008 06:58:40 PST
Robert Chan (Sales Account Manager, Santa Clara Team): V. Urgent
Rahul Ashok (Customer Service Manager, Mumbai Team)
Professors Tsedal Neeley and Thomas J. Delong prepared this case with the assistance of Research Associates Alison Comings and Patricia
Hernandez. Certain details have been disguised. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve
as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized,
photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.
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409-003
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
Rahul,
We have a major problem with HS Holdings. Their server went down on Sunday at
23:30 PST, and TIC [Technology Integration Company], their tech support group, called
us for help. The issue was at a critical level because their entire system was down for two
hours. This was a disaster for their online banking business. They’re now struggling to
respond to their customers who are furious.
They have a 24×7 Sun software premium—a $300K service—annual contract, but
NOBODY engaged them. They’re outraged. They’ve escalated the matter to Sun’s higher
management and are threatening a lawsuit because we violated their service contract. We
need to find out what happened and respond to their complaints immediately. I’ve also
left you a voicemail and a txt message about this.
Help!
Robert
Date:
From:
To:
Re:
Mon, 26 May 2008 19:51:44 IST
Rahul Ashok (Customer Service Manager, Mumbai Team): V. Urgent
Nick Elliott (Application Support Engineer, Santa Clara Team); Chan, Robert
HS Holdings
Nick,
Re: HS Holdings, we have paged the US team three times and left numerous
voicemails for the past several hours. We haven’t been able to get a hold of the customer
either. Pls investigate why the US didn’t provide any assistance on Sunday. They should
be on call to handle critical issues. We need to revert to the customer and our senior
management with an explanation ASAP. Customer threatening lawsuit.
Rahul
Date:
From:
To:
Re:
Mon, 26 May 2008 11:30:24 PST
Nick Elliott (Application Support Engineer, Santa Clara Team): V. Urgent
Rahul Ashok (Customer Service Manager, Mumbai Team); Chan, Robert
HS Holdings
I checked the system and it shows that HS Holdings’ situation was logged in 12 hours
ago in the wrong queue for resolution. We did not receive any pages about their system
outage because it was in the wrong queue! (It looks like it was the queue that is used to
hold issues pending support service account number verifications. The question is who
programmed this queuing error? Jamal in Dubai? Praveen in Mumbai?)
Nick
Date:
From:
To:
Tues, 27 May 2008 11:36:16 IST
Rahul Ashok (Customer Service Manager, Mumbai Team)
Praveen Devilal (Support Engineer, Mumbai Team); Elliott, Nick; Chan, Robert
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
409-003
Re: HS Holdings
Praveen, no page was received by the US support team. I am trying to understand
where the ball was dropped. I understand that US and Mumbai folks have exchanged
messages.
Robert, the engineers have restarted the server. But we need to talk to the customer for
confirmation that related networks are not affected. We’re all on the conference bridge,
but the customer has not called in. We left a couple of voicemails at his ext. (45890) to join
the conference call. We need him on the line…
Thanks,
Rahul
At the end of the thread was a message from Global Vice President Stephen Spurlock:
Date:
From:
To:
Re:
Tues, 27 May 2008 08:33:12 PST
Stephen Spurlock (Global Vice President, Santa Clara): V. Urgent
Greg James (Global Manager, Santa Clara)
HS Holdings: Lawsuit?!?
Greg,
Just got a call from HS Holdings’ attorneys. They said that their server went down for
two hours. Cost them thousands in lost revenue. They are asking us to pay for that loss
…and they want the $300K service contract money returned to them. Said it was the
second time this has happened. I talked to Rahul, and he alluded to problems with your
team…Did you know about this? What the hell is going on?
SS
Before James left the office, he asked his team in India to address the technical failure at HS
Holdings. He then booked his tickets to India, the UAE, and France to investigate and resolve the
issues.
James’ Journey
Though the HS Holdings’ system was up and running, the face-to-face meetings with his team had
uncovered deeper interpersonal issues. James decided to seek counsel from Pam Lawry, Sun’s Global
Markets vice president (VP) and a longtime colleague. He picked up his cell phone and sent her a text
message: “Can u video chat? I really need 2 talk to u.” A few moments later, his cell phone buzzed. He
quickly read her response, “B on in 30 mins.”
James tried to gather his thoughts. He had first joined Sun with high aspirations. When the company
launched the Open Work program that allowed people to work from anywhere, anytime, and anyplace,
James had felt as if he were part of the most cutting-edge company in the world. His manager described
him as “one of the best hires that I have ever had work for me.” But where his distributed team had
once been a source of inspiration, now it was a struggle that could derail his career.
His ruminations were interrupted when Lawry’s video call screen popped up. “Hi, Pam.”
3
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409-003
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
“What’s going on? Where are you?” Lawry asked with urgency in her voice.
“I’m in Paris.” James quickly explained his conversation with Spurlock and the HS
Holdings incident. “I spoke with Nick Elliott, who’s the primary contact for the account.
He worked closely with HS Holdings and TIC, their system integration contractor, to
customize our software products for their online banking system (see Exhibit 1). I wanted
to know why Nick wasn’t the first to respond. Nick was mad and explained that no one
called him. Even though his cell phone was off, all the engineers have his home number
for emergencies. He didn’t learn about the problem until the next day. I also spoke with
Robert Chan who said that he didn’t know about the problem until he checked his e-mail
on Monday morning. Both Robert and Nick think that Mumbai dropped the ball. They
should have gotten in touch with Nick or resolved the outage themselves.”
“So did Mumbai drop the ball? Why didn’t they call Nick?” Lawry asked.
James explained, “When I was in Mumbai, I talked to Rahul Ashok about it. He said
that as soon as Praveen Devilal got the call, he paged the on-call, after-hours US manager
three times. In his rush to reach the on-call manager, Praveen used the weekday contact
protocol instead of the weekend protocol. He forgot that it was still the weekend in
California.”
“Do you need to make your protocol procedures more error proof?” Lawry asked.
“Well, it’s not just a protocol problem,” James said. He thought about the long and
revealing conversation he had had with Devilal. “I asked Praveen why he hadn’t tracked
down Nick directly. He said that in the past he’d felt insulted by Nick. It appears Nick
was overheard saying that the Indian team wasn’t competent.”
“Really?” Lawry asked. James took a deep breath before responding:
“Yes, the issues are more complex than I realized. So instead of calling Nick’s home
number, Praveen tried to fix the problem with the help of his colleagues in India. He tried
numerous times to access the information about the client, but it wasn’t in their support
queue where all the client requests for help are stored. To make matters worse, the phone
number that we had for HS Holdings was disconnected. Praveen and Rahul insisted that
the HS Holdings crisis was caused by a queue that was poorly programmed and did not
notify the appropriate people in time. And Rahul’s team had nothing to do with that
queue. Jamal, an engineer in Dubai, programmed it.”
James continued:
“There had been some miscommunication between the US, India, and the UAE about
what the queue should do. The US wanted to streamline the way that missing account
numbers were assigned to projects. They asked Rahul to get someone on his team to
program it, but it ended up being done in Dubai. Jamal said his assignment was to create
a queue for accounts with missing contract numbers. So the queue he created sends an email to Robert in Santa Clara to fill in the missing contract number. According to Jamal,
this queue was not supposed to be used for emergency requests. The Mumbai team is
responsible for programming anything that has to do with customer emergencies.”
“Why didn’t anyone check the queue before it went live?” Lawry asked.
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
409-003
“Ahmed Nazr, the manager for the Dubai team, had a second programmer check
Jamal’s work, and he didn’t find any problems with it. But they were both working from
the wrong instructions. The queue should’ve been connected to the support queue that
everyone checks regularly, and it should have also sent an automatic page to the managers
on call,” said James.
“Greg, your team members are all acting like they’re on separate teams. . . . But, I still
don’t get the wrong client phone number part in all of this.” Lawry said.
“Seems like our contact person at HS Holdings moved departments a few months ago.
Nick should have updated the contact number on file, but he figured that anyone who
needed to get in touch with them would go through him.”
“What a mess! What was Elisabeth Fournier’s role in this? Paris is the Customer
Advocate for European accounts, right?” Lawry asked.
“I spoke with Elisabeth, and she did receive a call from HS Holdings manager,
Michael Thoene, an hour after their server crashed. As you can imagine, Michael was very
upset. Elisabeth immediately called Nick and me, but neither of us answered. She then
contacted Praveen, who returned Michael’s call, but by then Michael was out of the office.
Elisabeth had been dealing with angry HS Holdings managers all week, and she was
upset that no one in the US had answered her calls on Monday. She said that the Santa
Clara team was always the hardest to reach and the slowest to respond.”
James and Lawry spoke for some time before ending the call.
Lawry’s parting phrases ran like a ticker tape through James’ mind: “Build consensus, everyone
fully engaged, keep it simple, manage disparate voices.” He was feeling the heat from every corner of
the organization across the world.
Greg James
Greg James’s early career had been promising. He earned a bachelor of science in computer
engineering from Stanford University, where he was regarded as a star engineer among the technical
elites. His computer science professor described James as possessing “an uncanny knack” for solving
complex technical problems. He was sought by preeminent Silicon Valley technology companies,
including Sun, which he chose after extensive research. James opined:
Sun was perfect for me because it represented a combination of opportunities that I
felt I just couldn’t find anywhere else. I had the chance to help define the cutting edge of
technological innovation. At the same time, Sun had the stability of a fairly established
technology company where I could grow and develop professionally. It felt like it was the
best of both worlds.
Within four years, he had risen through development projects to managing a team and budget in
the Data Protection and Recovery Department. His team consistently generated work that received
rave reviews from customers. One customer sent James an e-mail praising his team for its “outstanding
customer service from the beginning to the conclusion of the installation.” Five years after joining Sun,
he was one of 50 managers to receive the coveted Sun Outstanding Manager award.
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409-003
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
In the pursuit of a growing global presence for Sun, Lawry tapped James for a high-profile global
team management position. The job was to implement and maintain the firm’s latest enterprise-wide
solutions for multinational Fortune 100 companies. For example, if an organization had 20 sites
throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, James and his global team would be the ones
responsible for seamlessly executing a plan to safeguard data across all 20 sites. The Sun team was
usually contacted after the customer’s own IT group could not resolve the problem.
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. provided companies with complete information technology (IT) solutions
that included hardware, software, storage, and services. Espousing the notion that core innovations
should not be proprietary, Sun made its technologies open source. The company’s philosophy was that
the freedom to assemble, participate, and create provided the spark for innovation. This guiding
principle enabled market expansion, which boded well for developers, consumers, and Sun alike.
Sun originated as a student project at Stanford University. In 1982, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy,
and Andy Bechtolsheim founded Sun Microsystems, deriving its name from the Stanford University
Network (SUN). A year later, Sun signed a $40 million agreement with Computervision, a computeraided design and manufacturing company. The company continued developing innovative network
technology, as well as personal computers and supercomputers. Sun’s ownership of some of the
leading products in network computing––namely the Solaris operating system, the UltraSPARC
processor, and the Java technology platform––gave the company an advantage over its peers. As a
“systems” company, Sun controlled all of these elements directly, as opposed to leveraging and
integrating the parts from other companies (e.g., suppliers of middleware, chips, etc.). In addition,
Sun’s strategy for forming strategic alliances – even with competitors like Microsoft – had paid off. By
2007, Sun had reached $14 billion in revenues with approximately 35,000 employees in 47 countries.
Competitive Industry
Sun was in a fast-paced industry characterized by high product turnover and rapid changes in
capacity. Companies not able to stay ahead of the technological curve quickly fell by the wayside.
Consequently, industry members had to invest heavily in research and development to succeed in such
an environment. The last few years had been particularly difficult, as profit margins were squeezed
from both sides. High input prices were raising the cost of production, and competitors were involved
in an intense price war. Loss of revenue had forced companies to look for other ways to slash costs.
Some began outsourcing to Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
Global Talent
One of Sun’s competitive strategies was to form global teams. By spreading out across the globe,
Sun was able to be closer to its customers, have access to a larger pool of talent, and provide service at
any hour of the day.
When Sun was developing or implementing a new product, it would choose employees to support
the product based on talent or leadership rather than location. The result was often a team of employees
operating from a diverse range of countries. Lawry described some of the benefits of having global
teams:
Our customers have offices in Asia, Europe, and throughout North and South
America. If we are to understand and respond to their needs, we need to have people on
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
409-003
the ground in each of these areas. How are we going to get the best people if we try to run
three work shifts in Santa Clara? You are not going to get an engineer with 15 years of
experience to agree to work the graveyard shift, and even if he did, there would be errors
and he’d quit after not seeing his family for a few months. Our policy is to follow the
sun—teams come online as the sun rises in their region and take over projects from areas
where the sun is setting.
These global teams varied in size and composition, but the majority were structured in accordance
with Sun’s “Rule of 11,” a norm that each manager should have direct supervision over approximately
11 employees.
Open Work
At Sun, diverse employees had to work together across multiple time zones and function within
their workplace locations. Along with the unique needs of a distributed team structure, employees also
expressed a desire for more flexible work arrangements to establish a better work-life balance. Starting
in 1995, Sun’s top management began brainstorming possible options. The company designed and
launched its alternative work environment a few years later.
The Open Work program combined technologies, tools, and support processes that enabled
employees to work from anywhere, anytime, using any technology. 1 According to the findings of one
of Sun’s studies, roughly 35% of all employees did not use their assigned buildings on a typical
workday. By implementing Open Work, Sun reduced its real estate holdings by more than 15% (2.6
million square feet), resulting in savings of nearly a half-billion dollars over the course of 10 years. In
2008, nearly 60% of Sun’s employees had participated in the program.
According to Seema Iyer, the Open Work program manager, employees had a choice of flexible
work arrangements. When new hires joined Sun, they decided along with their managers whether their
role was suitable for Open Work. The program consisted of three components. The first was a suite of
enabling technologies referred to as “mobility with security,” in which people moved between work
sites and had consistent mobile access to personal computer sessions. The second involved daily access
to workplaces that included the Sun campus, a drop-in office, a hoteling site, or a client site. Third,
employees could work from home or a Sun workspace when an alternative space was needed. The
organization provided monthly allowances to mobile employees for Internet, telephone, and hardware.
Iyer noted:
With Open Work, we’ve dramatically reduced our operating costs, and we pride
ourselves for developing an eco-responsible system in line with our “green approach to
business.” 2 Our employee satisfaction has risen and productivity remains strong. While
satisfaction with the program is high, it still has a number of critics who believe that faceto-face interaction is key to innovation.
Sun set up a suitability assessment for employees who wanted to participate in Open Work.
Managers filled out a category assessment survey that polled work patterns, activities, resources, work
1 This and other case details were taken from interviews with the following Sun managers: Seema Iyer, Wajid Jalaldin, Robert
Latham, Chris James, Will Rahim, and William Franklin.
2 Sun estimates that the average Open Worker emits 1.25 fewer metric tons of CO2 per year compared to a typical employee
assigned to a particular location. It is also estimated that each Open Worker avoids 135 gallons of annual fuel consumption (Sun
& University of Colorado, 2008).
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409-003
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
style, and background (see Exhibit 2). Sun examined factors such as the amount of time the employee
typically spent working at different locations, the extent of interdependence that the employee’s role
had with others, and whether work-related communication was usually virtual or in-person. The data
collection process also considered how frequently they worked from home, and whether they were a
self-starter.
Sun also established organizational systems––such as training for managers and employees
working in global teams, resources for home-based employees, and workshops on Open Work––to
assist with the adjustment to the new work environment. James’s team had completed these training
programs and used many of the resources.
James’ Team
Recruitment
Twelve months earlier, James had recruited his 45-person team – composed of 7 members in France,
16 in India, 11 in the UAE, and 11 in the US – to serve Sun’s enterprise customers in Asia and Europe
(see Exhibit 3). James was pleased with how easily the global team came together:
When I first took this job, I had no idea how to recruit new hires in other countries, but
the team came together quickly. We had several engineers in France who were brought in
for an unrelated short-term project. Their project was winding down, and I was able to
recruit a few of them. Then, I contacted our local human resources team in Mumbai, India,
which sent me 75 impressive résumés of graduates from the Indian Institutes of
Technology. I traveled to Mumbai for a week and hired 16 people. I did the same thing
with the UAE team. I inherited the USA guys from an acquisition of a start-up company,
and that worked out well because they already had a history of working together and
could be productive relatively quickly.
James had participated in Open Work in his previous management role and had found the work
environment beneficial. He hoped to use the program again, so he submitted an application for himself
and his team. When the application was accepted, some team members chose to work from home while
others used the flexible option.
Time Zone and Work
James kept in touch with his direct reports throughout the week. He also concluded that the best
way for him to keep everyone on the same page was to conduct weekly conference calls with his entire
team of 45. He described the calls:
I keep the agenda for these calls very predictable. The night before the call, I send the
team a “topics’ list” that usually has to do with customer installation schedules, service
contracts, and related issues that we must address. We run through the list, and I push for
commitments on next steps for every item. These calls can get very technical and drawn
out. My role is to make sure that we keep the big picture in mind. And because I
understand the meeting time is not perfect for everyone, I try hard to always start and
end on time.
James set the calls to begin at 08:00 Pacific Standard Time. This was 20:30 in India, 19:00 in the UAE,
and 17:00 in France. James felt the meeting time was the best choice, given everyone’s constraints.
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
409-003
During the visit prompted by the HS Holdings incident, James learned that he had missed some of
the more nuanced considerations of the meeting time. His technical lead in India, Ashok, told James
that the Indian team felt as if they were second-class citizens among the larger team. They had fewer
agenda items, their concerns were always reviewed last, and they felt consistently interrupted.
Moreover, the Indian team started work very early in the morning (06:30 IST) to get briefed before the
US team went offline. Being on the conference calls from 20:30 until 22:00 meant that the Indian
employees had excessively long days. James wondered if these concerns were behind his Indian team
members’ recent feedback on the Open Work environment (see Exhibit 4).
The final crucial irritant for the Indian team members was so fundamental that it had initially
escaped James’s attention. Ashok explained:
My guys are unhappy about the fact that they are often left to do customer
maintenance work. They think their focus should be on initial customer technology
customization and innovation. The other teams get the interesting work. But the moment
there’s a problem, we are the first ones dispatched to put out technical fires. If we are that
good, how come we are not good enough to get the creative work?
James knew that Ashok was a highly skilled engineer and manager who got his team working in
record time. Ashok was in his eighth year at Sun, seven of which he had spent in Santa Clara. He had
returned to India because he saw opportunities to more rapidly advance his career in the region’s
burgeoning technology market. Ashok was on track to manage the entire Asia-Pacific region that
included the UAE, and he served as a role model to younger engineers like Devilal.
Compensation Mismatch
James felt each country’s team was frustrated for a different reason. The French team had recently
voiced displeasure about what they termed a “compensation mismatch” between themselves and their
American counterparts. Although employee salaries were typically kept confidential, an American
team member had inadvertently disclosed his higher salary to his French teammate. James recalled:
There was an immediate firestorm within the team. The French members did not
understand why they were making 30% less than their American coworkers, even though
they were trained at the top technical institutions in their country. I tried to explain to
them that their salaries were consistent with their local market.
Jacqueline Martin, the technical support manager in France, had responded:
How can I tell my team that their work is valued, when the US guys get paid so much
more? My team works 50 hours a week and our schedule is unpredictable. We work from
home, but we are never home. My children say that they don’t spend time with me
because I am always on my laptop or on the phone trying to resolve problems. Just two
weeks ago, I had to miss my daughter’s recital when I got an urgent message from Ashok.
I just don’t understand why our work and our time are less valuable.
The Americans rationalized their pay by opining that France’s strict labor laws gave their French
colleagues job security, while the American workforce would be unprotected in the event of an
economic downturn.
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409-003
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
Vacation
The tension between these two teams carried over to perceptions about time-off as well. When the
French teammates took several weeks of vacation granted to them by law, US team members claimed
it was unfair that they had to carry the load. James tried to make the situation more equitable by
assigning more work to the French group, but he could not advertise that fact. Still, the Americans felt
unsatisfied. James could do nothing about the differing regulatory laws among the various countries.
He thought he had explained the need for his team to accept country-based benefits differences: “This
is part of global collaboration.”
Perceived Neglect
James realized that there was equal-opportunity disgruntlement among the sub-teams. After
pressing Nazr, the technical lead for the UAE site, he learned that the team felt deprived of sufficient
face-to-face contact with James. They were also nervous about becoming a subgroup to the India office,
which would have placed them even further away from James. Nazr went on to explain:
The team feels disconnected not just from you, but from the company as a whole. In
fact, we all worry that our performance evaluations will suffer because you may not
understand the unique culture and business challenges of our Middle Eastern market.
For the first time, James understood that the UAE team members feared they would be deemed
incompetent because they had consistently missed the deadlines that James had set in the last few
months. Their culture, however, required extensive and time-consuming relationship building before
contracts and commitments could be finalized. They often worked at two paces: their country’s pace,
and the company’s pace, which was driven by fast-moving and time-sensitive deadlines.
During his trip, James was also blindsided by the realization that Nazr’s team had strained relations
with Ashok’s team. As Ashok was preparing to take on responsibility for the region, he often
volunteered his experience and expertise. At first, the UAE team had been grateful for his guidance.
But they did not want to work under Ashok. James heard from Devilal, who had spent a week in the
UAE office:
Rahul sent me to Ahmed’s team when they were having trouble setting up a custom
application for a client. I really sympathize with those guys—everything takes so much
longer, so they have to work all the time to make our deadlines. But it was really
uncomfortable to be there, because I know Ahmed and Rahul don’t get along. No one
talks about it, but I think it’s because Ahmed is from Pakistan. I try not to think about
those things, but it is a big deal for some people.
U.S. Sub-team Viewed as “Favorites”
James cringed when he was accused of playing favorites with his US team. Members of the three
non-US teams had said that they sometimes received e-mail threads following an ongoing conversation
between James and the US team. By the time the threads reached them, it appeared as though decisions
had been made and they were copied only as an afterthought. James realized that he had spent more
time with the US team: “We do have more of the water-cooler conversations, but I do not understand
how that makes me a bad guy. I overheard one of my guys say, ‘With Greg, the rich get richer and the
poor get poorer.’ I really felt the sting of that comment.”
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
409-003
All of these concerns passed through James’s mind as he ended the video conference with Lawry.
He noted the cold comfort of her words:
Global markets are pressuring us to span operations across multiple time zones. There
is no going back. You need to figure out how to build consensus. You’re not going to be
able to get that developer from China and India and Prague all in the same room, and a
lot of issues quite frankly are time sensitive. You have to make sure that everyone is fully
engaged because you are managing systems for our most important clients.
Moving Forward
James knew that Sun was under tremendous pressure from its competitors and could not risk losing
customers. He considered himself lucky to have survived the HS Holdings disaster by averting a
lawsuit, but he knew that if he did not find a solution to his team’s troubles, his meticulous career
planning might fall off course.
James recalled sitting in his boss’s office, soon after he had received Spurlock’s terse e-mail. He had
never seen him that angry. Being on the receiving end of such criticism for the first time was shocking
to James. His heart raced as he remembered Spurlock’s stern warning: “Fix it. Fix it now. Greg, I want
you to tell me your short- and long-term plan to make certain that this never, ever happens again.
Something in your process is broken!”
The lack of face-to-face interaction with his teams in France, the UAE, and India was a problem. He
wondered whether he should increase face-time by traveling to every site on the first and third weeks
of the month. Or should he do the opposite and reduce face-to-face interaction with everyone,
including the US team? James also considered conducting multiple all-team meetings throughout the
week to increase communication across cultural and national boundaries. He questioned whether his
problems were with the larger structure of his team. He also had doubts about whether his customer
demands were even suited to the number of team members and the Open Work environment. He
wondered, most of all, if he had mismanaged the team. What could he do differently moving forward?
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Case writer.
Source:
Exhibit 1
HS Holdings’ Online Banking Implementation and Support
409-003
-12-
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
Exhibit 2
409-003
Sample Open Work Suitability Survey Questions
Work Preferences & Characteristics: Please check (√) the description that best captures you and
your work situation.
[ ] I am good at planning and organizing my work so that it can be done effectively from any
location.
[ ] When I am away from the office environment, I find it difficult to motivate myself to set my own
goals and accomplish them.
[ ] I have the self-discipline necessary to work productively in an unstructured work setting like my
home.
[ ] The office environment is not an important source of social contact for me.
[ ] I would miss people or feel isolated working by myself at home.
[ ] My coworkers accept and respect those who do not to come into the office every day (i.e., work
from home, etc.).
[ ] The ability to work anytime, anywhere is very important to me.
[ ] I need flexibility in my workplace choices as a way of balancing my work/nonwork needs.
[ ] I prefer the stability of using the same office space on a routine basis, rather than choosing where
I work each day to suit my work needs.
[ ] I often travel to customer, partner, vendor, or other non-Sun locations as part of my work.
[ ] My work has discrete timelines and milestones that can be quantified, measured, and monitored.
[ ] I always make sure my manager, coworkers, and/or customers know how to quickly find or
reach me, no matter where I am working.
[ ] Information sharing and knowledge exchange occur informally, through direct person-to-person
contacts on the job.
[ ] Much of my dealings with coworkers and customers involve communicating electronically using
phone, e-mail, or other online technologies.
[ ] Most of the in-person interaction I have with others at work is impromptu, informal, and
spontaneous.
Source:
Company.
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Source:
Case writer.
Field Support
Engineer
Contractor –
Application Support
Engineer (2)
Software Engineer (5)
Contractor –
Support Engineer (3)
Application Support
Engineer (2)
Field Engineer
Systems Support
Engineer (3)
Program Manager
Software Engineer (3)
Project Delivery
Manager
Business
Development
Manager
Jacqueline Martin
(France) Technical
Support Manager
Technical Support
Engineer (6)
Elisabeth Fournier
(France) Customer
Advocate
Service
Engineer (2)
Senior Field Engineer
IT Technologist
Application Support
Engineer
Hans Joerg (USA)
Technical Support
Manager
Greg James (Santa Clara,
CA, USA) Global
Manager
Services Account
Manager
Rahul Ashok (India)
Customer Service
Manager
Organization Chart for Greg James’ Team
Ahmed Nazr (UAE)
Customer Service
Manager
Exhibit 3
Application Engineer
Sales Account
Manager
Kathryn Weeks
(USA) Product
Technical Support
Anthony Majewski
(USA) Customer
Access Evaluation
Representative
-14-
Joy Mah (USA)
Administrator
409-003
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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
Exhibit 4
Source:
409-003
Surveys of Satisfaction with Open Work for Greg James’s Team
Case writer.
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