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Raising Cultural Intelligence

Culture is the way in which a group of people understand and interpret the world, solve problems, attribute value and behave. In fact, our behaviour and perspectives are influenced by the environment and national culture we are exposed to at an early age, and are ingrained in early neurological development.

In her session Cristina will explore cultural dimensions such as work styles, communication patterns, relationship and time management, amongst others. Through well documented frameworks and real life cases, this session seeks to raise awareness of our own assumptions, while improving our understanding of other cultural preferences. In this way, participants can begin to develop strategies to have more effective cross-culture interactions.

Cristina Escallón is an independent consultant in strategy and leadership. She has been Director of a Leadership Centre at INSEAD, Faculty Advisor to London Business School Strategy programmes and lecturer for various business schools (INSEAD, LBS and Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), on both the Executive Education and MBA programmes. A native of Colombia and engineer by background, she started her career in marketing with Procter & Gamble. After completing her MBA at INSEAD in 1995, she moved to New York and later London where she joined Accenture as a strategy consultant, then moving on to Human Capital Strategy Director. With a global team, Cristina developed a Human Capital strategy for Accenture worldwide, defining leadership, culture and talent requirements for the firm; working with teams in regions like China, India and the US.

Since 2005, Cristina has worked as an independent consultant as well as a coach; most of her corporate work focused on design and facilitation of senior team sessions. She has worked across various industries, including consumer goods, IT, retail, health, aerospace and financial services. She sits on the Board of a real estate company in Latin America.