Dr. Douglas-Val Ziegler – Senior Associate Consultant
Val has twenty plus years experience and world-class expertise in languages, cultures, computer systems, global and virtual organisations, and business processes and has been a leader in providing globalisation services to product development organisations, whether on-shore or off-shore. He is known as a visionary global leader and “out of the box” thinker - a master of bringing order out of chaos and translating vision into implementation.
At Idea Connection Systems (ICS), Val’s current focus is the globalisation of ICS products and services, and their adaptation to the ethnolinguistic and sociocultural situations in areas such as United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Singapore.
When Val was 10 years old, he started studying Esperanto, the planned international auxiliary language - this was the beginning of his life-long passion with languages and cultures. His subsequent educational odyssey has included study at SUNY Brockport, the University at Buffalo, the University of Rochester, Universidad de Puerto Rico, and the University of Ghana, West Africa; in addition to extreme amounts of corporate and executive training in global leadership and global business.
Val’s educational focus has been on the sociocultural as well as computational aspects of language, especially the area of cultural and linguistic diversity and oneness. This has included work on language and culture contact (and conflict!); dialectology; and multilingualism; and has involved the study of, or research on, more than 30 languages. One of his specialties is African-American languages and linguistics, and he was as a pioneer researcher on the Spanish spoken by Cuban slaves and their descendants; and the pidginized English spoken in Ghana, West Africa; as well as the languages of the Saramaccan Bush Negroes, descendants of runaway slaves who, for three hundred years, have lived in semi-autonomous societies in the jungles of Suriname, South America.
Professionally, Val has spent the past 25 years in the field of globalisation, i.e. the internationalisation (making them universal in their usability and applicability) and localisation (translation plus cultural adaptation) of products, computer systems, processes, and organisations. At companies such as Computer Consoles, Eastman Kodak, Xerox and Nortel Networks (where he was Sr. Director of Globalisation), he has been in staff as well as management positions and has created and managed highly-diverse, award-winning teams; and has been a key figure in defining and implementing corporate-level global product development processes, and globalisation technical strategies.
Some of his most interesting achievements were a patent on the use of 3D imaging technologies for displaying multilingual and multimedia content; computers that speak several Chinese dialects; computer systems that can support the creation of multilingual and multimedia documents; and a Team Excellence award in the Xerox Research Labs.
For ten years, Val was a Commissioner on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Greater Rochester Commission and recipient of the MLK, Jr. Freedom Award in 2004; he was also a Board Member of the Institute for Ethical Leadership, affiliated with the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School.
Val is currently on the Editorial Board for Globalization Management Review, a new journal serving as a source of knowledge for key managers concerned with international business; and is one of the founders and organisers of the Globalisation Management Strategies Conferences, part of an effort to foster the development of a cross-industry network of leaders responsible for managing various aspects of corporate globalisation, such as international product development and managing global and virtual multi-functional, multi-cultural and multi-national teams. GMSC 2007 will be held in collaboration with the GLOBE Center at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey on 29/30 March 2007.
Val and Holly, his wife of 32 years, have two sons, Jamie and Jeremy.
