Contacts: Tom Roehl, WWU professor of International Business, (360) 650-4809, or tom.roehl@wwu.edu.
BELLINGHAM - Western Washington University will host Mary Yoko Brannen, the Spansion Chair of Multicultural Integration and a Professor of Business at San Diego State University, at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 8, in SMATE 110 as a lead-in to the University's Japan Week celebration at the end of the month.
Brannen's talk, "Global Talent Management and Learning for the Future: Pressing Concerns for Japanese Multinationals," is free and open to the public and co-sponsored by WWU's College of Business and Economics.
"Brannen brings an unusual combination of academic principles and real world business knowledge about the problems of working across cultures. She has written about the importance of what she calls 'marginal normal' managers, people who are respected for the way they represent their own side, while being unconventional enough to see how the partner firms or managers might cooperate for the common good," said WWU professor of International Business Tom Roehl. "While her talk will be about talent management in Japanese firms, there are lessons to be learned for all multinational firms (and firms that deal internationally) on how to get the most out of their people and their partners."
Brannen received her master's degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in International Business, and her doctorate in Organizational Behavior with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Born in Japan and conversant in Asian and European languages, she has taught at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan; Smith College; the Keio Business School in Tokyo, Japan; Fudan University in Shanghai, China; and currently at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.
For more information on Brannen's free lecture, contact Roehl at tom.roehl@wwu.edu; for more on Japan Week, e-mail WWU's Center for International Studies at cis@wwu.edu.
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