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Global collaboration, or the ability to collaborate with people different from ourselves or even across species, becomes increasingly important in our interconnected world to engage constructively with and across difference. As we face more complex challenges, both locally and globally, the need for the creativity and innovation made possible by diverse perspectives is only amplified. Through five stories from our work as consultants and practitioners helping organizations to collaborate, we explore the role of global leadership in collaboration during times of crisis in various sectors. We began by asking ourselves a series of questions about global collaboration that could also serve as future research directions for scholars. We argue that new forms of leadership are required in the global context where both tasks and relationship domains are characterized by high complexity. We conclude by providing insights and recommendations for global leaders to address those complexities through collaboration and help their organizations learn from their experiences in crises and beyond.

This case study examines the evolution of R&D knowledge management at Japan’s business equipment maker Fuji Xerox, from the sashimi system, a Japanese origin of concurrent engineering, to its successor zen‐in system, which is composed mainly of a real high‐tech discussion room equipped with databases that provide technical information and two 70‐inch displays that shows virtual but real‐size, three‐dimensional graphic models. We found that Fuji Xerox has chosen the “hybridization strategy” that mixes human‐based and IT‐based knowledge‐sharing techniques. We also argue that concurrent engineering provides not only efficiency benefits but also positive effects on group and organizational creativity. Finally we present a conceptual framework of “how concurrent engineering works”, i.e. uncertainty and diversity necessitate concurrency which produces such benefits as efficiency and creativity, and which in turn realizes product integrity.