Megacommuters

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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."