They say people live up to their name. With a name like Barbara - Latin for foreigner or exotic outsider ;-) - I didn’t have to. Born into a Spanish-Dutch-Russian-French family, I was predetermined to be a foreigner in any country. Looking for a different vocation to live up to, I found that “adventurer” had gone out of fashion as a job title since my great-grandfather’s times; my nautical engineer grandfather had taken the title of first to implement radar navigation; and my father had laid claim on rocket scientist and a lifetime of space exploration. With all the cool jobs gone, but desiring to be a “first” in my family nonetheless, I set out to explore business instead. Needless to say, innovation and technology have remained mainstays in my career.As a business administrator with a major in accounting and internal control, I had the opportunity to marry these skills with technology when, in the mid-nineties, I joined PeopleSoft to help centralise EMEA shared services and implement their own ERP in the process. Over the 25 years since then, I have had the great fortune of gaining experience within a range of business management roles in Amsterdam, London, Dubai, Madrid, Hong Kong and Ho Chi Minh City. Having dealt with the interesting dynamics present within each region, I can appreciate that good business practices always win out, no matter what the language or cultural differences.
Listed skills include Management, Strategy, Business Strategy, Management Consulting, and 20 others.