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W. L. Gore & Associates: Developing Global Teams to Meet 21st-Century Challenges1

Frank Shipper

Salisbury University

CASE 26

Greg L. Stewart

University of Iowa

Charles C. Manz

University of Massachusetts–Amherst

I

n 2010, W. L. Gore & Associates celebrated its 52nd year in business. Founded in 1958 by Bill and Vieve Gore in the basement of their home, Gore had grown into a global enterprise famous for its high performance fabrics, medical products, and next-generation electronic products, as well as its use of self-empowered teams of employees (called associates at Gore). In its earlier years, the company had endeavored to restrict the size of its different corporate facilities to 200 associates or fewer, a practice that helped keep the number of teams at a given facility to a manageable number and facilitated cross-team coordination. More recently, however, to better cope with the challenges of a global marketplace, increasing numbers of teams were composed of associates in different facilities, sometimes facilities that were spread across three continents; the coordination of team members working in different facilities was enabled by online communication. In 2010, Gore’s products were sold on six continents and used on all seven continents, as well as under the ocean and in space. The company global operations required teams of associates to tightly coordinate their activities in developing, producing, and marketing products to customers across the world. Currently teams were organized primarily along product lines, with only a few teams consisting of members working in the same Gore facility. As a consequence, it was common for team members to be separated by thousands of miles, work in multiple time zones, speak

different languages, and live in quite different cultures. The diversity among team members, combined with the company’s emphasis on growth and globalized operations, presented significant challenges for W....