And Turner has numerous projects overseas tapping New York teams. The roster includes the $5-billion, 226-building urban redevelopment of central Doha, Qatar; Kuwait City’s $500-million, 80-story Al Hamra Tower; the 51-story LEED Gold Torre BBVA Bancomer project in Mexico City; and the $1.5-billion Triple Square Resort starting construction this year in Busan, South Korea.

Division Of Labor

Clearly, some tasks are more suitable for home offices than others. For architects, it’s usually high-level conceptual work, Perkins says. Today, Perkins Eastman sends 80% of traditional design work for the China market back to New York. On any given day, about 60 New York staffers handle international project tasks, Perkins says.

While language skills are key for New York staff on global projects, strong computer and communication skills are equally critical, both because of time differences with foreign offices and also the need for staffers who go abroad to be self-sufficient. “They won’t have that support structure of a big office around them,” Perkins says. “They’ll be sitting in the client office 13 hours away and are expected to perform at long range.”

International work never consumes all of New York professionals’ time at Hazen and Sawyer, but they make significant contributions, Seed says. Around 40 staffers worked on the Dakar study, starting with two senior engineers who visited the site for in-depth reviews before bringing back much of the design work.

At PB, international collaboration tends to be informally organized, with project leaders on foreign market jobs often tapping peers through the firm’s “practice area network,” a sort of internal social-networking forum, Allibone says.

For Turner, New York resources focus on preconstruction, administrative and engineering systems development tasks, such as logistics planning, scheduling and estimating, Billotti says. “We have 25 to 30 people in New York who provide corporate support to our people in the field,” he says.

Teams hired in the country lead the work, but New York specialists still get on airplanes to help advance sophisticated projects. Billotti says the most important skill to bring overseas is the ability to “project a humble image” and remember that “you don’t know what you don’t know” when engaging foreign market partners.

A willingness to travel also helps, adds John Braley, director of business development for Turner International, who travels regularly and notes that an attempt to assemble the group’s senior leadership today would take months to schedule.

Tishman similarly asks foreign market offices to run point on construction after having tapped New York-based legal, human resources, marketing, estimating and finance teams. While its Abu Dhabi staff has grown to 30 in two years, it regularly leans on six to eight operational and administrative staffers in New York, Livingston says.

A big driver of this model is that owners don’t want construction executives to “parachute in,” Livingston says. “They want the lead people sitting there.”

Architects face different onsite staffing expectations, but also often need leaders on hand for clients, Perkins says. He recounts what he thought would be a one-time fly-in to join a four-firm international design team in 2008 bidding on a master plan for Hanoi. Only after the group won did Perkins find out Vietnamese officials wanted a visible American presence at key junctures of the redevelopment plan—no small chore for a principal of a 600-person firm based in New York.

“I ended up going 26 times and spent 150 days there over a two-year period,” he says. “That’s how for two years I became chief planner for the city of Hanoi.”