Meet the Expert
Mary Yoko Brannen PhD
Professor of International Business, University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business
- Born and raised in Japan, with advanced studies in the U.S., France and Spain, Mary Yoko Brannen has worked as a cross-cultural consultant for over 25 years to mostly Fortune 100 companies.
- Specializes in helping multinational firms realize their global strategic initiatives by aligning and integrating critical internal organizational resources. Advises management on developing knowledge-sharing architectures, creating a global language strategy, leveraging bicultural boundary-spanners, and careful selection and deployment of global teams.
- Holds the Jarislowsky East Asia (Japan) Chair of Cross-Cultural Management at the University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business and holds a Visiting Professorship of Strategy and Management at INSEAD. She is a founding director of the Institute for Global Learning and Innovation.
- Serves as Deputy Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies – the highest ranked journal in the field of international business.
- As a researcher, internationally recognized as an expert in ethnomethodology and qualitative studies of complex cultural organizational phenomena. Current research includes knowledge-sharing across distance and differentiated contexts; also, directing a global research project focusing on biculturals and people of mixed cultural origins as the new workplace demographic.
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Global Strategic Audits - Making the Most of Your Global Footprint
Professor of International Business, University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business
Defined Terms
- Global strategic audit
- A global strategic audit is a tool for assessing geographic, technological and human resource advantages that the company may have overlooked in order to build a company-specific knowledge-sharing architecture as an engine for sustainable global competitive advantage. These audits will uncover whether or not the company has a functioning and dynamic knowledge-sharing architecture. They can expose lost opportunities. And they can help companies sense, meld and redeploy valuable market, technological, and practical knowledge resulting from an operating presence that is global and at the same time deeply entrenched in local contexts. Audits can further help companies discover how well they are working with subsidiaries, maximize global team resources, and discover how well they have assessed and are deploying their global human resources.
- Knowledge-sharing architecture
- The system in place within an organization which allows market knowledge, technical know-how, and best practices from throughout its global footprint to be accumulated, referenced and shared in a strategic manner. This knowledge-sharing architecture should take the form of a continually-updated database and a global organizational structure with clearly-defined and clearly-articulated knowledge sensing and sharing roles for global team members, including norms for reporting, stockpiling and referencing the database. It should also allow for effective communication across an organization's global footprint.
- Lingua franca
- A shared language that is adopted by a group of speakers who natively speak different languages.
- Recontextualization
- How the meaning of your firm's assets or core competencies change when implemented or transferred into new cultural or geographic contexts.
Global Strategic Audits - Making the Most of Your Global Footprint:
Defined Terms
Expert Topic