Guest lecture by Professor Mary Yoko Brannen

Asia Research Centre is happy to be able to invite you to a guest lecture by

Mary Yoko Brannen, Professor of Strategy and Management, INSEAD:

Knowledge sharing across and the role of biculturals

Mary Yoko Brannen is the Spansion Chair of Multicultural Integration at the Lucas Graduate School of Business in the heart of the Silicon Valley, California and Visiting Full Professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD, Fontainebleau. She received her M.B.A. with emphasis in International Business and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Brannen's expertise in multinational affairs is evident in her research, consulting, teaching, and personal background. Born and raised in Japan, having studied in France and Spain, and having worked as a cross-cultural consultant for over 20 years to various Fortune 500 companies, she brings a multi-faceted, deep knowledge of today's complex cultural business environment.

Professor Brannen's consulting specialty is in helping multinational firms realize their global strategic initiatives by aligning, integrating and deploying critical organizational resources. Her consulting clients include Ford Motor Company, Fuji/Xerox, Fujitsu, Hewlett/ Packard, Honeywell, Intel, Motorola, Proctor and Gamble, Sony Japan, Sony Electronics, Sony USA, Spansion, Ltd., Toppan Ltd., Toyota Motor Company, and the Walt Disney Company.

Professor Brannen's current projects include: integration advisor/ top management team coach to two high tech mergers and acquisitions in the Silicon Valley, ongoing research on knowledge sharing across distance and differentiated contexts, and directing a global research project focusing on biculturals and people of mixed cultural origins as the new workplace demographic-identifying types of biculturals, personal case histories, and designing and conducting a larger quantitative study to determine key attributes of people with mixed cultural identities as cultural brokers (bridges) in multinational companies.

Professor Brannen serves on the editorial board of several international management journals including the International Journal of Business Innovation and Research (IJIR), the International Journal of Cross-Cultural Research (IJCCR), and Organizational Research Methods (ORM) and has published articles in AMR, AMJ, JIBS, JMI, Semiotica, and several anthropology journals. She has won several awards for her work including the Breaking the Frames Award from the Journal of Management Inquiry, the Dean's Research Award, and two Distinguished Teacher's Awards.

Optional reading attached: When Mickey loses face: Recontextualization, semantic fit, and the semiotics of foreignness by Mary Yoko Brannen.