DESPITE THE EARLY HOUR, the morning sun is already beating down on the top of an office building on Fremont Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. It’s the headquarters of Barclays Global Investors, and its global head of technology, Paul Stevens, is already at work, having arrived at 6:15 a.m. even though he flew in from London late the previous night.

At least one week a month (sometimes two), Stevens is in San Francisco, where most of the company’s top managers are based. The rest of his time is spent in London or shuttling between corporate offices in Sydney, Australia, Toronto and Tokyo. Barclays is the world’s largest institutional investment management company; it handles more than $800 billion in assets for more than 1,900 clients in 37 countries?mostly pension funds for global giants such as Citibank, General Electric, General Motors, Sony and Toshiba.

It’s the dawn of a typical workday for Stevens?managing his far-flung, multicultural global IT empire. The secret of his success, revealed as his day unfolds, is deftly dealing with the true nemeses of global companies: people politics and cultural conflicts.

The politics are aggravated by Barclays’ heritage of multicultural mergers. The business is the culmination of a series of mergers and acquisitions that bolted Nikko Securities, a Japanese bank, on to San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. before the whole caboodle was sold to London-based Barclays Bank. IT was not only fragmented globally but also splintered within offices; the funds management function, for example, has a wholly different IT setup from the fixed interest securities group.

Britisher Stevens, headhunted from Wall Street in 1999 after five-and-a-half years at J.P. Morgan, was given a simple mandate: Sort it out and stick it all together.

Can’t We Communicate?

Fulfilling the mandate hasn’t been easy, Stevens says with a sigh. "People aren’t physically colocated and are culturally very different," he says. "Communication is a perennial problem. I have to do a better job at communicating; my direct reports have to do a better job at communicating?but the people who are listening have to do a better job at listening."

One of Stevens’s early communication innovations was a rolling global program of "Sit Down with Paul Stevens" sessions. Wherever he is in the world, time is found for Stevens to sit down for a town hall meeting with a selection of a dozen or so employees, including programmers, administrators and data center staff. "Not the people who report to me but the people who report to them," Stevens says. The agenda is open: "You can ask anything you want, provided you ask it politely," he says.