about

Pia’s expertise lies in developing and managing sales and distribution channel cooperation of exporting companies, especially in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus. Having been in business with Russia for more than 20 years and consulted companies from various industries (from cosmetics and food to IT and machinery) in their go-to-market efforts and business development for 10 years, she has realized that the lack of cultural competence is often the deal-breaker. She joined The Culture Factor Group in 2017 to fulfil her mission to make managers and leaders culturally competent to improve their success rate in global business.

Pia has conducted workshops for hundreds of managers to improve their leadership and management, and also sales, customer service and team performance in different cultures. During the year 2019, she concentrated on mastering Huib Wursten’s 7 Mental Images model (clustering countries based on the 6-D dimension combinations) reducing the complexity for working with the around 200 cultures in the world and laying the groundwork for finding compromise solutions between standardization and adaptation for organizations’ operations. Organizational culture and change facilitation connected to the multicultural environment is also close to her heart.

Pia holds an MBA from the London South Bank University and M.Sc. in Russian translation and interpretation from the University of Eastern Finland.

Before her consultancy career Pia worked, for example, as Regional manager and ExPat Head of Moscow representative office managing a multicultural team in mobile sector for 4 years and Unit and Project Director in a marketing agency for 3 years. She has studied, worked or lived in Moscow, Almaty and London.

resources

LinkedIn articles

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/piakahara/detail/recent-activity/posts/

Book

• The 7 Mental Images of National Culture: Leading and Managing in a Globalized World (author Huib Wursten, editors: Erika Visser and Pia Kähärä)