Allyson Stewart-Allen is an internationally renowned business expert in the fields of international marketing and working across cultures. A Californian based in the UK for over 20 years, she runs a thriving business from her offices in Los Angeles and London, where she lives and gets to apply her fluency in French and German.
As well as running management courses, workshops and coaching executives, she contributes as a guest expert to a wide range of international newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes appearing on CNN, CNBC, Sky News, BBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, Financial Times, USA Today amongst others.
Known as "The Muse of Marketing" on Sky News, where she spent 4 years as their weekly guest expert on the Business Report programme, Allyson has regular columns in Market Leader and Internationalist magazines.
She is co-author of best-selling book Working with Americans, the first-ever business manual exclusively about the US business culture, to help business people navigate their way to improved relationships and profits from their American business partners, bosses and colleagues. Notably, the book was the first business book to feature at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Allyson is also a contributing author in the latest edition of The FT Handbook of Management as well as the book Win New Business. She also authored the booklet Marketing in the USA for the British Government’s UK Trade & Investment agency.
One of the anecdotes Allyson tells about navigating across US and European business cultures is the need to choose your words and brand names carefully. “When you table an agenda for a meeting in Europe, you propose it for discussion right now. In the US, it has the opposite meaning: to put it aside to discuss later. I’ve seen this paper-shuffling aerobics waste a good chunk of valuable time in meetings. That is, until they start talking about the ‘turnover’ of the business – which is when the Americans reveal they’ve just fired a quarter of their workforce while the Europeans think that’s an odd way to discuss the level of sales! Eventually they both figure out that the word has different meanings in these countries. As do some brand names, as the UK grocery chain Tesco is learning with it’s Fresh & Easy brand name in San Francisco!”
Allyson is a member of the Senior Advisory Board of New York-based Business for Diplomatic Action, setting itself the small task of improving the image of the United States and US business around the world. She is also listed in "Who’s Who in the World", "Who’s Who in America" and "Who’s Who Among Women", she is a Programme Director at London Business School’s Centre for Management Development, a Fellow of the Marketing Society, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Fellow of the British American Project, an active member of the American Marketing Association, Institute of Directors and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Institute for Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
In addition to these affiliations, she took her MBA degree from Claremont Graduate University under the direct tutelage of Dr. Peter Drucker.
