About The Kozai Group
The Kozai Group is comprised of 5 partners: Allan Bird, Mark Mendenhall, Gary Oddou, Joyce Osland, and Michael Stevens. They have an aggregate of 45 years of living and working abroad, including 145 combined years of conducting intercultural research and training. They have published 25 books and over 200 scholarly journal articles, including several widely cited pioneering studies in the areas of international management and intercultural effectiveness. They continue to use their vast knowledge in these areas to deliver training to organizations in the private, public and non-profit sectors on 5 continents.
Allan Bird, Ph.D.
Dr. Bird has served as President of The Kozai Group, Inc. since 2001. He is also a Senior Professor at the Goa Institute of Management in Goa, India. From 2009 to 2019 he was the Darla and Frederick Brodsky Trustee Professor in Global Business at Northeastern University. He teaches courses in global leadership development, intercultural management, international negotiations, and intercultural and global leadership assessment. He is a qualified administrator of the Global Competencies Inventory and speaks and reads Japanese.
Mark Mendenhall, Ph.D.
Dr. Mendenhall is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of global leadership and international human resource management. He is past president of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management. In 1998, he held the Ludwig Erhard Stiftungsprofessur endowed chair at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), and from 1999-2004 he was a visiting professor at the Europa Institute at the University of Saarland (Germany). In 2013, he was a visiting professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria), and from 2009-2015 was a visiting professor at Reykjavik University (Iceland).
Gary Oddou, Ph.D.
Dr. Gary Oddou, Ph. D., professor emeritus, has taught, researched and consulted in the area of international human resource management for over 30 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 45 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.
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. Joyce is the Lucas Endowed Professor of Global Leadership and Executive Director and founder of the Global Leadership Advancement Center (GLAC), which is housed in the School of Global Innovation & Leadership at San Jose State University’s Lucas College and Graduate School of Business in the Silicon Valley.
Michael 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.
Brian Millett
Brian Millett has 30 years of IT experience including Software Development, System Maintenance and Systems Integration. Brian has developed award winning applications (Intelligent Fault Locator), contributed to open source projects such as mod_perl, coocon v1, and scap-security-guide. Brian is a two time (RHEL3/RHEL6) Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) with 10+ years of enterprise level Linux experience. Brian received his B.S. in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo in 1984.
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. He 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.