Zak Dychtwald on Why Global Teams Break Down (Part 1)

Zak Dychtwald is the founder and CEO of BridgeWorks Global, a cross-geography collaboration lab based in Shanghai. He is the author of Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World, has lived in China for over a decade, and speaks Mandarin. His clients include Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Medtronic, Walmart, and Ant International. His work has appeared four times in Harvard Business Review, most recently in a piece on how highly effective global teams collaborate across cultures — now running as a feature in HBR Magazine.

In Part 1, Zak makes the case that global teams don't break down on culture — they break down on operating design. He lays out a framework of seven elements that determine how well global teams work, split into friction amplifiers (time zones, language, country culture), which leaders can manage but never really change, and trust-and-alignment multipliers (HQ-region power dynamics, company culture, market knowledge, process), which they can redesign. Most leaders pour their energy into the first three and ignore the last four, where all the leverage actually sits.

He introduces bridge people — the senior leaders and frontline operators whose real job is holding the seams of a global company together by translating context between headquarters and the market, absorbing the time-zone load, and moving decisions across language and hierarchy — and the global collaboration tax, what those people absorb on the company's behalf. He explains what happens when a crisis hits a team that has never designed for one, and where leaders should start when they recognise the problem in their own organisation.

Discussion Points

· Why global team collaboration breaks down at the level of systems, not culture — and what the data from the Global Collaboration Index actually shows

· The seven elements of cross-border collaboration: friction amplifiers (time zones, language, country culture) vs trust-and-alignment multipliers (HQ-region power dynamics, company culture, market knowledge, process)

· Bridge people: who they are, what they carry, and why most companies fail to acknowledge or reward them

· The global collaboration tax: what it costs a business in speed, opportunity, and attrition when bridge people absorb the friction the system creates

· What happens when a crisis hits a global team that hasn't defined decision rights in advance — and where leaders should start when they recognise the problem in their own company