In 1989, the CEO of my global employer allowed me to work from home rather than demand I move halfway across the US to be near corporate headquarters. Two technologies made his decision possible: Overnight delivery and an early fax machine. I was the first distributed worker other than our sales and product service representatives. Flash forward to 2013. I worked for IBM where 45% of its global workforce (and growing) worked from home offices. Those of us already virtual referred to IBM as “I’m By Myself.” We used a shared on-line knowledge base so poorly structured that we often entered the IBM site pretending to be a customer—it was the fastest way to find the information that we needed to complete a pitch deck. Many a day, I thought I was working for a computer, not a company. Distributed work is an…