Kenneth Alan Grossberg is Professor of Marketing and Director of the Waseda Marketing Forum at Waseda Business School. He has been active in international business and management education for more than forty years, much of that time spent working in Japan and the Pacific Rim. He graduated from Hobart College (B.A. 1966 Summa cum laude with Honors in Political Science), and earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University in Politics & East Asian Studies (1977). His research was carried out at the University of Tokyo and at Harvard University, where he was elected a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows in 1974. Prof. Grossberg was a published authority on Japanese history before he became a specialist in international marketing and Asian political economy. He has worked in investment banking, banking and strategic consulting in addition to the academic world.
Dr. Grossberg started his academic career at Harvard, but in 1980 he turned to the private sector. Fluent in Japanese and Chinese, he was the first investment banker at Prudential-Bache Securities to work on mergers and acquisitions in the Asian market. He left investment banking to establish Orient-West Consultants, Inc. to offer strategic consulting services to companies involved in the Japanese market. In 1985 Citibank recruited him to be Vice President and Chief of Strategy for their Consumer Services Group / International in the Asia Pacific region. As chief of strategy he was responsible for managing Citibank’s strategic planning process in ten Asian countries and for creating and directing the bank’s consumer banking strategy in Japan. In the late 1980s he returned to the academic world when Yeshiva University invited him to develop the marketing program for their new Sy Syms School of Business.
In 1992 Dr. Grossberg was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Research Professorship to Tel Aviv University. At Tel Aviv University he developed and managed high-tech, client-oriented and client-financed consulting joint ventures with MBA programs in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. He has been visiting professor at the Harvard Summer Economics Program, the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, the Technion, Nanyang Technological University and Columbia Business School’s Fundamentals of Management Asia program. In 2001 he became the first non-Japanese professor to be granted tenure at the International Management (MBA) program of Waseda University in Tokyo, and in 2002 he founded the Waseda Marketing Forum (www.wasedamarketing.com). He has also been core faculty in: a joint double degree program (MBA/MOT) of Waseda University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and the EU-funded Waseda ETP-Japan Program for young European business executives. Under the umbrella of the Waseda Marketing Forum, in 2012 he inaugurated the Start Up Nation Study Tour of Israeli innovation which he leads every summer.
E-Mail: kengross@waseda.jp Website: http://wasedamarketing.com/
Tel: +81-3-5286-3967 / Fax: +81-3-5286-3922
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