Global Portfolio

I strongly believe that in order to do well, we must learn from those who came before us. For this reason, I was very excited to complete the informal interviews portion of this Global Reflection Portfolio. I wanted to interview two professionals from different fields who have had international business experience within different business models ...

The Opening: Parag Khanna begins his inspiring talk by comparing the amount of infrastructure that we currently have that increases connectivity (i.e. telecommunications cables, roads, power grids) to the total length of country borders. He is trying to show that while there are a lot of borders, there is more connectivity. This is an interesting ...

As the manager of international expansion for Konsyl, Kim Vaccari was the ideal professional to conduct an informational interview with. I first met Kim last year while participating in an international consulting project for the company through the University of Maryland CIBER program. During the project, I learned that Kim’s official title of Sales Operations ...

Tonight, we had the pleasure of hearing from Mexican (ex-)President Vicente Fox and Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage. They took to the stage to debate the current and controversial debate of globalization versus nationalization. (Click here to view the recording.) While there were some community outcries about banning this event, University of Maryland President Wallace ...

I met Professor Haas-Kotzegger during my Global Branding class at the Vienna University of Business and Economics in Austria. I was always highly interested by the real-life examples that she would give in class to illustrate concepts from the course. My Brand Blog on this portfolio website is actually, in part, thanks to her class. ...

Vice President of Government Relations As of June 2010, Bill Plummer is the head lobbyist for Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications network company. Bill Plummer explained to us how Huawei has grown over the years to becoming the trusted telecommunications network company while the United States wouldn’t let it get its foot in the door. It’s ...

Store Manager Frank Briel has been with Ikea since the 1990s. He seems to have a real knack for the job, having performed it at several stores, including one that he opened in New England. Because Frank Briel has been with the company for so long, he was uniquely positioned to tell us about the ...

New Zealand Ambassador to the United States Tim Groser has held several important international positions in the New Zealand government. He was the New Zealand Ambassador to the WTO from 2002 until 2005. Three years later, he held the position of Minister of Trade for seven years. During that time, he had significant influence on ...

My Global Strategy class had the pleasure of hearing from the Managing Director at Harbour Group, Richard Mintz, on February 19th. He has held a number of global public affairs positions, including with the Bill Clinton administration. Thanks to his experience, Richard Mintz was able to give us a broad overview of the state of ...

Partner and managing director of the Global Business Policy Council Erik Peterson and his colleagues at A.T. Kearney Consulting create a top 5 trends prediction every year for the upcoming five years. We had the pleasure of discussing some of those trends with Mr. Peterson at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of ...

Director of Global Expansion Team Terran Potor started out at Under Armour in 2004 as a customer account specialist. Throughout the years, she has grown with the company and is now the Director of the Global Expansion Team. Terran has helped Under Armour expand to 90 countries with 350+ stores. Two things that I found ...