
Organization and Cultural Issues: Building and Managing a Virtual Organization
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the former IBM executive who led the company's internet and Linux strategy, teaches this session of MIT's ESD.57 Technology-based Business Transformation course from Fall 2007. The lecture examines what happens to an organization's structure and culture when work moves online and teams stop sharing a physical location. Wladawsky-Berger draws on his own corporate experience to walk through the practical problems of managing people who never meet face to face: how authority and trust get established, how decisions get made without a shared office, and how corporate culture either survives the shift to virtual work or quietly dissolves. The talk sits inside a graduate course on technology-driven business change, and it treats the virtual organization not as a technical setup but as a management challenge, comparing traditional hierarchies against looser, network-based structures enabled by internet-era tools. Running well over two hours, it has the depth of a full seminar rather than a quick overview.