Dr. Janet Walsh is currently an adjunct professor in the Executive M.B.A. program within the School of Management. She will be keynoting the 2017 RISC Conference in Richmond, VA. The Conference is hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University and brings together business and insurance professionals from around the world. Dr. Walsh will be speaking on global workforce risks. Her speech outlines the three major types of global workforce risks and what companies can do to create a better risk/reward environment. We can’t avoid risks, but we can reduce the impact of risk on business. Business leaders who don’t take care to ensure their information risks, personnel risks, and security risks are properly identified and insured risk loss of life, financial and operating failure, and damage to reputation and products. The talk reviews these three risks in depth, then concludes with how risk professionals can better connect with their clients to provide risk data, information, and risk mitigation.

Furthermore, Dr. Walsh has been asked to present her research paper at the Global Conference on Business and Finance in Costa Rica in May. She will speak on “Success characteristics of foreign direct investment in Cuba.” This was the subject of Dr. Walsh’s doctoral dissertation and is part of her ongoing research. She will be talking about the critical market entry activities that differentiate companies who are successful in entering the Cuban market and companies that are not successful. What is interesting about this subject is the difference between market entry activities that result in success in most countries, and those activities that result in market entry success in Cuba.

Dr. Walsh as the chair of the Denver International Business Executives Resource Group will be hosting Dr. Bart van Ark, EVP, senior economist and senior strategist at Mountain States Employers Conference in Denver on March 30. The topic of discussion will be Uncertainty and Global Growth in 2017 – How do They Go Together? While the world has entered a period of greater political uncertainty, the impact on economic and business growth has been mixed so far. In the short term, uncertainties are being enjoyed by financial markets and even amongst non-financial businesses there is a positive sense of change due to new directions in fiscal policy and regulation. For the medium term, however, there are no signs yet that policy changes will alter the trend. While business needs to stay focused on strengthening qualitative growth factors, such as skills, technology and innovation, possible disruptive forces from trade policies create substantial downside risks around the medium-term growth outlook.

Some key learnings from this presentation are:

-Get an understanding of the growth projections and underlying drivers for countries and regions around the world.

-Assess the key risk and opportunities around the world, in particular from the new U.S. administration, Brexit, and the relationships with Russia and China.

-Obtain an informed view about the differences between trends, shocks and disruptions, and how businesses can respond to each of those.

-How to prepare your company for digital transformation in age of rising labor and skill shortages.

By Konstance Teleisha