Winning and maintaining key accounts – building long-term, trusting relationships across diverse cultures and among high level decision makers, including clients and partners, by:

• Rapidly creating and communicating tailored value propositions – allowing clients or potential clients to navigate, grasp and fully benefit from complex offerings.
• Effectively operating across a broad spectrum of business sectors and commercial interests – managing a client base and pipeline of potential clients across 20+ sectors and 35+ countries.
• Quickly establishing authentic and warm personal rapports – even across geographic distance and cultural difference.

Marked sensitivity to differing cultural expectations, particularly as a bridge between East and West – fluent in Chinese after 7 years living, working and studying in China and Taiwan and 10 years studying Chinese language and civilization at Leeds, Edinburgh and Shanghai (Fudan) universities.  

Combined with a mini-UN family backdrop – English, Hungarian-Swiss, Italian, Chinese, French and Brazilian.

Especially concerning design and innovation of new products, services and business models, having worked:

• 10+ years as a consultant to the UK’s Design Council and the EU-China Environmental Management Cooperation Programme and
• 8+ years helping hundreds of multinational companies make full use of the World Business Council for Sustainable Business to develop ‘business solutions for a sustainable world’.

A natural communicator equally strong in writing, speaking and listening; presenting complex concepts or offerings with engaging freshness, adapted to different audiences; sifting piles of information for nuggets that can spark light bulbs of the mind; an award-winning author known for lapidary English and subtle wit.

Warmth, authenticity, tact and integrity; self starter and standard setter in quality and professionalism; humour and charm to engage and disarm.  I believe in the power of kindness, spontaneous or structured, unleashed for positive ends – one of the most rewarding and demanding approaches never mentioned in management books.   In sum: good karma, no drama.

I have set up or run a range of projects for clients and employers, including:

• Sustainable Mobility Project 2.0 (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) – as acting Director working with 15 global corporations across the mobility spectrum, moving from initial scoping to fully-fledged USD 4.5m project in under a year, and leading the recruitment of permanent staff.
• Young at Art (Design Council) – a Design Council and London Institute collaboration on experimental art workshops for disadvantaged children, raising their awareness of environmental issues.
• Science, Technology and Reading (STAR*) – combining science and poetry to deliver science, technology and reading requirements in UK schools, in partnership with the Design Council, Royal Society of Chemists, Institute of Physics, and Esso.

Clarity and creativity in thought combined with (un)common sense; teasing structure and simplicity out of complexity; strategic and lateral thinking to connect people and ideas, expand options and solve problems.