Global Teams: How the best teams achieve high performance

By Jo Owen

Published by FT Publishing/Pearson

Much has been written about globalisation. Much less has been written about global teams. Globalisation depends on small teams of people from across the world making things happen. These teams may be working on supply chains, R&D, serving a global customer, building a global service or product, running IT, risk, finance or HR for the firm. Global teams are the oil that helps global firms work.

Having spotted a gaping hole in the business literature – no book to date focuses on global teams and how they work – Jo Owen has undertaken some unique research running in-depth interviews with team leaders and their people across 80 companies, over three years.

The challenge

Nobody needs reminding that the number of business books almost exceeds the number of readers! This might be an overstatement, but the competition is huge.

The solution

Work very closely with the author to understand the key themes of his book and turn them into attractive media pitches. Stress the book’s USPs: based on an in-depth study of companies of all sizes, in many different sectors, and across a wide range of geographic locations. This enabled me to catch the media’s ear in an extremely noisy arena.

The result

The Sunday Times (ABC controlled circ. 772,614) featured the book in its business pages and so did financial daily City AM (circ. 91,372). Moreover, several inflight magazines covered it, including Business Life (BA Inflight, ABC circ. 95,809) and Swiss (Swiss Airlines, 16.17 million passengers annually). As a result, the book was sold across airport bookshops. It also attracted the interest of many top business media, such as Fortune.com (11 M MUVs), Financial Management (Chartered Inst. of Chartered Accountants, circ. 90,666) and MEED ((Middle East Economic Digest, ABC circ. 4,830).