Who We Are
The five partners of the Kozai Group include Allan Bird, Mark Mendenhall, Gary Oddou, Joyce Osland, and Michael Stevens. The partners have a combined total of 45 years living and working abroad and more than 100 years conducting intercultural research and training. They have published 19 books and hundreds of scholarly journal articles and book chapters, including several pioneering studies that are among the most widely cited in the areas of international management and intercultural effectiveness. Over the course of their careers they have delivered training to organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sectors on five continents.
Partners
Allan Bird, Ph. D.
Allan Bird, Ph. D. holds the Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies in the College of Business Administration, University of Missouri-St. Louis. His Ph.D. (1988) is in Organization Studies from the University of Oregon. He received his his M.A. (1983) in Comparative Culture and International Management from Sophia University in Tokyo. Allan’s research activities focus on several different areas relevant to managing in a global environment: Japanese top management team, career, and compensation issues; expatriate management, global leadership, and HRM in Japanese overseas affiliates. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, the Journal of International Business Studies and numerous other academic and practitioner journals.
He is also the author of a book on Japanese boards of directors, Executive no Kenkyu (in Japanese). Other books include Japanese Multinationals Abroad: Individual and Organizational Learning (Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Encyclopedia of Japanese Business and Management (Routledge, 2002). He published with Roger Dunbar and Tom Mullen, Bridging Cultures, a CD-ROM and workbook, for expatriates and their families. Bridging Cultures won an International Gold Medal for Interactive Educational Software at the 1998 New York Film Festival. Allan has served as a consultant to Japanese and American companies as well as to the Japanese government and several trade organizations. His advice and commentary are also sought after by the media, as reflected in his appearances on business-related broadcasts at CNN, FNN and CNBC, as well as regional television and radio in the US and Japan. His comments have appeared in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and various regional newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News in the United States and national dailies in Japan such as the Mainichi Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and Japan Times.
Mark E. Mendenhall, Ph. D.
Mark E. Mendenhall, Ph. D., is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of international human resource management. His areas of expertise are in the areas of global leadership development and assessment, and the cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates. He currently holds the Frierson Chair of Excellence in Business Leadership at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He held the Ludwig Erhard Stiftungsprofessur Chair at the University of Bayreuth, and is a faculty of member of the Europa Institut, the first MBA Program established in Germany. He is past president of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management. His most recent books are: Managing Human Resources in Mergers and Acquisitions (Stanford University Press, 2005); International Assignments: An Integration of Strategy, Research, and Practice (Lawrence Erlbaum Press, 2004); and Developing Global Business Leaders: Policies, Processes, and Innovations (2001, Quorum Books). His book, Developing People Through International Assignments (1999; Addison-Wesley), is widely read by HR executives involved with expatriate management programs.
He has consulted with, and conducted numerous training programs for many firms, some of which include: IBM-Asia Pacific, IBM-Japan, National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), Boeing, Monsanto, and J.C. Bamford Excavators (JCB). Mark has published numerous scholarly articles some of which appear in Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organizational Dynamics, Human Resource Management, Management International Review, and International Journal of Intercultural Relations.
Dr. Gary Oddou, Ph. D.
Dr. Gary Oddou, Ph. D. has been teaching, researching and consulting in the area of international human resource management for over 25 years. His research focus has been in the area of expatriate adjustment and training, repatriate reintegration and knowledge transfer expatriate-repatriate best practices and global leadership. He has published over 40 articles and book chapters on these topics and written or co-edited three books related to international human resource management and global leadership. He has been invited to speak on these topics at universities and at business conferences in Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Asia.
He has regularly taught outside the United States, including at top universities such as the National Economics University, Vietnam; Ecole de Management, Lyon, France; Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and the University of Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. He has also been a research associate and facilitated management development experiences at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition, Dr. Oddou has regularly consulted with multinational firms in the areas of expatriate and repatriate management both in the United States, Japan and in Europe.
Dr. Oddou has held department chair positions at San Jose State University and Utah State University. He has developed and currently directs and teaches in the Global Business Management program at CSU San Marcos.
Joyce Osland, Ph. D.
Joyce Osland, Ph. D. is an internationally known specialist in international management with a focus on global leadership, Latin America and organization development. As the Lucas Endowed Professor of Global Leadership, Joyce founded the Global Leadership Advancement Center and co-founded the Global Leadership Lab in the College of Business at San Jose State University located in California’s Silicon Valley. Her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior was earned at Case Western Reserve University. A former president of the Western Academy of Management, Joyce has won numerous awards for teaching, research, and leadership. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Army Research Institute since 2005.
Joyce’s research interests — global leadership development, expert cognition in global leaders, cultural sensemaking, and repatriate knowledge transfer — focus on practical ways to improve global skills and organizations. She has over sixty publications — research articles in leading academic journals like the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, and Human Resource Management as well as practitioner articles, book chapters, and cases. Her first book, The Adventure of Working Abroad: Hero Tales from the Global Frontier, (Jossey-Bass, 1995), was used in corporate training programs for expatriates. Joyce is currently working on the ninth edition of her two textbooks, The Organizational Behavior Workbook: An Experiential Approach and The Organizational Behavior Reader.
Joyce lived and worked overseas for fourteen years in seven different countries, mostly in Latin American and West Africa. She worked in the field of international development as a program manager, trainer and consultant and also spent three years as a full-time faculty member and consultant at INCAE (The Central American Institute of Business Administration and Latin America’s top business school) in Costa Rica. Joyce is a visiting professor in graduate programs all over the world.
Due to her international reputation in experiential learning, Joyce has designed and taught hundreds of executive education workshops. She has been training executives and trainers in global leadership for a decade. Consulting clients during the last 20 years include General Motors, Standard Fruit, the World Intellectual Property Organization (United Nations), Costa Rica’s Ministry of Tourism, Bestfoods and Spansion.
Michael J. Stevens, Ph. D.
Michael J. Stevens, Ph. D. is a management professor at Weber State University. He also consults widely with organizations in the business and not-for-profit sectors. His primary areas of expertise include: improving organizational performance through empowerment and teamwork; individual assessment and selection (especially for teams and cross-cultural assignments); executive coaching and leadership development; the impact of leadership on organizational culture and employee performance; and interpersonal effectiveness in the workplace.
He received his Ph.D. from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University, where he won the Ralph G. Alexander Best Dissertation Award from the Academy of Management. He has published book chapters and research articles in highly respected management journals, and regularly gives presentations at professional conferences and seminars.
Dr. Stevens is a widely cited researcher who has conducted pioneering work in the area of measuring a person’s interpersonal aptitude for working successfully in teams, and is the lead author of the commercially distributed “Teamwork-KSA” employment test. He is currently active in several professional societies and has held management and board positions in industry, government, consulting, and not-for-profit organizations.
Senior Representative – Norihito Furuya, Ph. D.
Norihito Furuya, Ph. D. is Senior Representative of the Kozai Group in Japan. He is also CEO of IGB Network Co., Ltd (Global Organization and Human Capital Development Institute). IGB Network specializes in global training and coaching for managers, global HR assessment, global HR capital solutions, HRM system and organizational development, and research and development. Mr. Furuya has lived and worked in the United States, the Middle East, and the UK, totaling nine years of overseas working experience as an expatriate manager for Japan Airlines. He has over 30 years experience working internationally, and has extensive experience in conducting training and consultation services in the arena of global human resource management for 35 of the leading firms in Japan.
Twelve years ago, he initiated the International Training Division of JAL Academy, a collaborative venture with JAL, BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), and Thunderbird (AGISM)). He holds a Bachelor’s degree of Social Science from Waseda University and an MBA from Aoyama Gakuin University. He received his Ph.D from Tsukuba University.