Megacommuters

By CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER

It is a typical school night, and Eileen Rudden is helping her 13-year-old son Joe with his homework. A seventh-grader, he has been asked to write a fictional paper about World War II. Joe comes up with a plot involving a Japanese kamikaze pilot who meets an American naval officer from Iowa. Rudden talks over the story with him, reading drafts and suggesting revisions. The back-and-forth exchange goes on for hours. Rudden values times like this with Joe and her two other sons, Sam, 17, and Charlie, 9. She wouldn't miss them for the world. Not even when she is half a world away.

Rudden, 47, a senior vice president at software maker Lotus, based in Cambridge, Mass., is on the road an average of two nights a week, often flying to Europe and Asia to meet with key customers and take the pulse of market conditions, staying as long as a week at a time. "I'm running a significant piece of our software business, and it's a global business," Rudden says. Still, she adds, "I talk to the kids every day. No matter where I am, we try at least to have the equivalent of a dinner conversation." When she's in Europe, that means calling her kids at midnight, after business dinners and networking. When she's in Asia, 12 to 14 hours ahead, she wakes up at 5 a.m. and sends homework feedback via e-mail in between rounds of morning sit-ups. "I'm always multitasking," says Rudden.

While she is by no means the typical business traveler, Rudden represents a new breed that is just as likely to be in Kazakhstan as Kokomo, Saxony as San Francisco. Post-cold war market expansion, economic deregulation and a proliferation of air routes have made the world a much smaller place, traveled at a much more frenetic pace, than a decade ago. According to the National Business Travel Association, a resource for corporate travel managers of FORTUNE 500 and 1,000 companies, 6% of all business travel was international in 1994, three years after the Soviet Union disbanded and five years after the Berlin Wall came down. That number leaped to 20% in 1997.

"The demands on the business traveler today are a lot larger than they used to be," says Ruth Stanat, author of the new book Global Gold: Panning for Profits in Foreign Markets. The fall of the Iron Curtain is the crucial factor in the expanded scope of business travel. "When the walls came down, a lot of companies started taking a look at Eastern and Central Europe and China," Stanat says. "This effect has now permeated Latin America, because of political stability. As a result, the travel situation is explosive. And as a result of that, employees of expanding companies have had to change their life-styles."

Stanat is the founder and president of SIS International Research, which provides market feedback for companies like Motorola and Wendy's that want to do more business abroad. A world traveler in her own right, Stanat has traveled to more than 100 countries since 1989 to help clients develop business intelligence and world trade. From 1989 to 1993, when Stanat was setting up SIS's worldwide research network, she says she "virtually lived on an airplane," spending about 80% of her time traveling. "It used to be," she says, "that the business traveler would only have to make a trip to Europe on a given excursion. But a lot of companies, because they are exploring different regions, will now ask that person to cover Europe and Asia in one trip. So they are almost doing a round-the-world trip, packing in meetings upon meetings and in some cases stopping off in Latin America before they return. There is a high burnout factor."

Ernst & Young executive John Peetz, for one, can feel the heat coming. "I'm so tired I can hardly see straight," says Peetz, 48, coming off a trip that took him from his home base in Los Angeles to New York City, to Zurich, back to New York City, to Washington, to Cleveland and finally back to Los Angeles--all in two weeks. As the accounting and consulting firm's "chief knowledge officer," he is building a global information network so that all 82,000 of his company's employees around the world will have access to the firm's database. How often does Peetz travel? "I don't know," he replies. "Would it be easier to ask how often I'm not traveling? Except for the weekends, I'm always traveling." In the past six months he's been to Paris, London, Frankfurt and Sydney; this month, he is going to Stuttgart, Amsterdam and Paris, and in the summer he will fly to Sao Paulo and Singapore.

To be competitive in the world today, Peetz says, global networking is vital. "In order to deliver world-class service to our clients," he says, "we need to effectively link our expertise. And there are many more specialties--industries, subindustries, technical disciplines, regulatory disciplines and so on--than there were 20 years ago. You need to have many more pockets of expertise in different areas to effectively serve a multinational client."

In addition to needing specialized knowledge of many kinds, today's business travelers must also be corporate chameleons--highly adaptable to different situations and environments--and they must have superhuman endurance. Two years ago, for example, Californian Susan Nycum, a coordinator of the rapidly growing high-technology practice at worldwide law firm Baker & McKenzie, took a 14-hour flight to Hong Kong, arriving at 7 a.m. Her luggage barely in hand, she was on her way to a contentious all-day meeting with clients, directly followed by a dinner. "They all were impressed that I came to the meeting after just arriving," says Nycum. But she really wowed them when she handled the choppy ride on a junk to the restaurant and stayed for the duration of the festivities, which did not end until nearly midnight. "They were all thinking that I would just give up early," says Nycum. "They were really taking my measure to see when I was going to fold."

Personal security is a factor in this new, wide-open world. A growing number of companies are taking extra steps to ensure their employees' safety as they log those mega-miles. Don Hubbard, national director of security for Coopers & Lybrand, saw the need to bolster the company's international travel-security policy after an executive was trapped in a Mexico City restaurant by three gunmen, robbed and released. Hubbard contracted the services of an international advisory service, accessible to all 19,000 of the firm's employees through the Internet. Hubbard can also send out "all-hands e-mails," with alerts on everything from the threat of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia to the possibility of flu-tainted chicken in Hong Kong.

Reaching the far corners of today's global market means not always staying in four-star hotels. Consider the experience of Howard Kaplan, 36, executive vice president in charge of technology-transfer projects for TransChem Finance & Trade, a Delaware-based firm that works primarily with developing and former communist countries to make their agricultural and energy systems more efficient. Local contacts always strive to give him a taste of their culture. He has eaten (by hand) a spit-roasted cow in Romania, hunted for boar in Tatarstan and ridden a camel through Mongolia. Getting the local touch often means bedding down in rather unusual accommodations. Last year, for example, he stayed in a yurt in Turkmenistan. "They wanted me to have the experience, so I stayed one night," says Kaplan. "I was sitting in the middle of the yurt, on Turkmen carpets, and they roasted a lamb outside. The vodka is sitting in the middle of the yurt in the middle of the desert." Though Kaplan enjoyed his stay, being the affable guest can take a toll. "You're not sure all the time what you're eating," he says. "You're up late, and the host always wants you to drink far too much. So it gets a little draining."

For those who think business globe trotting will taper off as communications technology replaces the need for personal contact, Kaplan argues to the contrary: "When we see the way the Asian financial crisis affects the stock market here, people realize they have to go and get a feel for the markets they are in. The way we do business might change, but there is no replacement for physically experiencing a country." Most important, Kaplan adds, is building relationships. "If you're going to have a comfort factor with anybody in any country in the world, you need to build up a face-to-face trust." If he is right, business travel is going to be more arduous and demanding for a long time to come.