Imagine the dynamics of an international engineering project such as this one: a U.S. group designs, prototypes, and qualifies disk drive heads; wafers for the drive heads are manufactured in the U.S. and sent to Malaysia for subassembly; a South Korean firm assembles these components; the final product, a fully automated disk drive, is completed in Japan. In addition to the global complexities of the project, there are a host of issues in leading the project team spread across continents.