While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

Global distribution of work is generally associated with the process of subdividing a work/project into discrete or overlapping components and distributing them among teams operating at different geographical locations. These teams work together to achieve work/project objectives from their respective locations. Two of the major and primary reasons of distributing work across geographically different locations are cost reduction and access to new markets. Availability of educated and skilled workforce in the developing industrializing countries at cheaper costs is the main driver behind the developed countries distributing their works in developing countries. On the other hand, developing countries have readily agreed to work on these works/projects as these appear to be a major avenue of employment for their people. The global distribution of work has expanded its wings into various sectors of business, spanning from knowledge-intensive sectors like Information Technology (IT), Biotechnology, and Research and Development, to skill- and labor-intensive sectors like Manufacturing, Engineering and Construction. This paper deals with the various issues and challenges that companies face while distributing their work between geographically different locations. It lays special emphasis on the issues and challenges related to construction companies. Though the literature survey suggests various issues that are common across all industries, construction industry has its unique set of key concerns pertaining to distribution of work globally. This paper tries to highlight these unique pragmatic concerns along with the issues which are common to most of the industries.

Developing countries are considered to be the promising destination for the developed countries in terms of distribution of their works. Availability of educated and skilled workforce at cheaper cost and access to new markets are the main drivers for global distribution of work. Construction projects by their inherent nature require skilled manpower, machinery, material and capital on a relatively large scale. Availability of all these inputs at the cheapest cost and in the best quality has been the challenge for most of the construction companies throughout the world. Subdividing the work into discrete or overlapping work components and distributing them among various players situated at different geographical locations reduce the challenge to a great extent. Moreover, a single firm might not have all the inputs required at their disposal, so the logical alternative for the companies is to source the inputs from where they are cheaply and readily available.

Supply Chain Issues in Globally Distributed Construction Businesses, Global distribution, geographical locations, Information Technology (IT), Biotechnology, and Research and Development, to skill- and labor-intensive sectors, Manufacturing, Engineering and Construction.