SNAPSHOT
The manager: Sarah Gkonos
The job: Country Director of the Oxford Business Group
In brief: Oxford Business Group is a leading publisher of economic and political intelligence on the markets of the Eastern Europe, North and South Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Through its range of print and online products, OBG offers comprehensive and accurate analysis of political, macro-economic and sectoral developments, including banking, capital markets, energy, infrastructure, industry and insurance. Written by a team of analysts based on the ground for six months, the groups critically acclaimed publications of economic, political and business annuals have become the leading source of intelligence on the region. OBG has a 71 900-strong readership, 60 per cent of which come from Europe, 20 per cent from the US and the rest from the elsewhere in the world.
As the old adage has it life is a journey. And a girl in her late teens re-jigged it to extrapolate the message of her life. Namely, travel for the spark in the eye, travel to understand things better, travel to be broad-minded and transcend stereotypical thinking.
And travel has been a keyword all across the answers of Sarah Gkonos, the girl whose very American background and upbringing kept her without a passport and within the boundaries of her own country until she was 18. Already in her first year at the university, however, the time of her very first days away from parental dependence, Sarah hit the road. By her early 30s, the girl had her own travel map checkered with a dozen countries on four continents.
Travel has always been atop her wish list to the extent that this infatuation has been a prime prerequisite when looking for a job. In this regard, the sequence of job positions, including as a customer representative at Vanguard Group and a marketing official at ING Group, has not only given Gkonos as conventional understanding presumes that logical evolution for professional skills but also the means to reach the travel-replete dream job.
The Oxford Business Group seems to be the very last item in Sarah Gkonos job series. Here her learning-through-travel philosophy looks to be converging 100 per cent.
And the very philosophy in itself seems to pay off at the OBG. Barely past her 30th birthday, she is in her first managerial position, as OBG country director for Bulgaria.
OBG gives me the opportunity to travel, to continually interact with people and last but not least, the intellectual challenge that allows me to develop. I am staying here for as long as they keep me, Sarah said with the broad smile of a someone who feels right where she is.
The executive perspective
As a manager, Sarah Gkonos is entering into a brand new stage of development. Even though she is equipped with the full kit of skills for the OBG to entrust her the top office in a country, she has many novelties to master.
As a country director, she is everyones point person for partners, clients, interviewees. I need to find the time for everyone, Gkonos says.
She is also in charge of organising the entire workflow of OBGs main project in Bulgaria, the annual overview spanning all political and business developments in the country.
My job generally entails getting the book published, Gkonos says. So I basically work with analysts and I have to figure out who the analysts should meet, then I filter the information they got through and then forward it to our senior editor. So as far as analysis goes, I pretty much wait to see what they come up with, then I take that and filter it through to the right people.
The report is in need of neat external and internal organisation.
Since all OBG analysis is based on field work, namely meetings with senior executives and political figures, all of whom have tight agendas, Gkonos needs to adjust her own and the schedule of her colleagues according to the time windows of the interviewees. Besides being able to adequately speak with such individuals and get the relevant information is no less a tantalising challenge. Her previous positions helped her master this situation.
At ING, I had the opportunity to meet with the companys CEO alongside other senior executives, Gkonos says, recalling that she had direct access to all channels of communication with top-tier experts. Namely, she attended corporate meetings, heard top executives presentations, had the chance to thereafter contact them by e-mail: the entire scope of interaction that can make one get a full grasp of the executive perspective.
And challenges do not end here. She is also the person to allocate work among her colleagues, as well as to co-ordinate analytical pieces from external writers, as is the case with, say, the capital and tax and accounting chapters. These two, in particular, have been assigned to OBGs partners, First Financial Brokerage House and the Bulgarian office of Ernst&Young.
Co-ordination with partners and external contributors being a prime challenge, internal co-ordination is no less of an apple pie, Gkonos says. Within an agenda of external meetings, Gkonos needs to be consistent with her administrative chores.
Administrative work involves a lot of e-mails and paperwork and editorials that go back and forth because we work remotely from our head office. All that happens during the day needs to be reported to the senior manager before the following morning, Gkonos says.
No matter the predicaments, the end result brings the OBG director satisfaction. Gkonos is confident her skills are going on the exponential. All the more, she feels increasingly in control of the unpredictability factor. And at all levels.
Adaptation, adaptation, adaptation
Unpredictability is two-pronged, Gkonos says. It stems both from the nature of her work and from the national peculiarities of Bulgaria.
You not only need to acclimatise to a different corporate culture, Gkonos says, but also to a different culture altogether, including a new business culture. You need a very high level of adaptation.
Gkonos arrived in Bulgaria after a six-month posting to Egypt, a country she loves and to which she is to return on completion of her work in Bulgaria, quipping that she put all her negotiation skills to earn a new six-month posting to this country. Barely exiting from Egypt and accommodating herself in Bulgaria makes juxtaposition or rather contrasting the two business cultures easy for Gkonos.
Small things affect immensely the way you do business, even things such as shaking the heads in the affirmative and negative ways, Gkonos says. In Egypt, to be an hour late is not an issue, whereas in Bulgaria everyone is pretty punctual and if youre 15 minutes late people say: Excuse me but
Yet generally Bulgaria in itself is causing her little problem, Gkonos says.
Many of the problems she encountered in Egypt are not of an obstacle in Bulgaria. In Egypt, she says, people sometimes dont feel at liberty to say what they want to say. Sometimes if they are afraid when they are on the record you may end up not coming with what you are looking for.
Sometimes you have hours and hours of tape and pages and pages of information and all you can pull out of it is a couple of sentences.
Sometimes we get individuals who initially agree to talk, they talk and when we get to them to ask for permission to publish they withdraw it at the last minute.
Sometimes we come across this problem in some very raw emerging markets where a lot of the information on the same subject coming from publications and government officials is completely different. In this case, we pick the most reliable source and make an approximation.
Sometimes we do our own analysis as well as to how to go in compiling this information, take averages and correct the numbers.
Drawing a parallel with Romania, a country where she lived for almost a year, Gkonos believes that Bulgaria seems to be the nicer place to live and work in.
I lived in Romania for almost a year and I can speak solely about the differences between Bulgaria and Romania, Gkonos says. Since the two countries entered in the race for the European Union, people tend to think of them in an easy way, while they are very, very different.
People both corporate executives and politicians in Bulgaria are nicer, more open to do business. Bulgaria is a smaller country and probably for this reason it is friendlier to foreign nationals. Having in mind the past Communist regime, the mentality here is changing faster both in the political and business world.
Annual book changing
OBGs annual publication, to be issued next year, will take into account the changes that have occurred in Bulgaria over the past few years and, especially, the countrys progress in months after the countrys accession to the EU. The very fact that the next annual report will no longer contain the emerging word speaks for itself. Rather, it will concentrate on what has happened several months after EU accession and what is to happen in the coming years, what the objectives of the government are and what the business community wants to achieve. This is what we are trying to find out, Gkonos says.
'We' at OBG
And the we form is essential when it comes to working atmosphere at OBG. Gkonos describes herself as a team player rather than of the authoritative type, although she wished she were more of that type, Gkonos says, smiling. At work, she relies on her teams inherent responsibility to get the job done and on time rather than guide her colleagues through direction.
We are trying everyone to hold his end of the bargain so that no one lets others from their team down, Gkonos says, while enumerating ways to motivate people into getting their job done properly.
Taking the responsibility issue past the office door, Gkonos said that the very fact the book reaches 71 900 readers from several continents makes each person quoted in the paper mind that he says things in an accurate and precise way.
Therefore, it is in everyones interest to be providing the information as is, Gkonos says.
Competitive edge
And the OBG is definitely interested in serving as accurate information as possible because groundwork is the competitive edge it steps on. This fact has also predicated the change of OBGs logo to The Inside Edge, alluding to the fact that information is first-hand.
We have the inside scoop, the inside information and we are the only company, which is using its own information and not through information that you can reach on the internet, Gkonos says. What a correspondent, for example, can find out is what he finds out for two or three weeks and we are here for six months.
In this sense, the OBG has no direct competition whatsoever. Though there is the indirect. She likened the OBG and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) by the groundwork approach, but the OBG was the sole think-tank to present as encompassing political and business overview. The EIU releases reports more frequently but they focus on individual sectors, Gkonos says. Yet Gkonos believes that the two entities are currently more of partners than rivals because they have already done a number of projects together.
Going further, she featured the New York Times and the Financial Times, for example, as indirect competitors in that they served country reports but they do not go as in-depth, Gkonos added.
The future of Oxford Business Group
The company, according to Gkonos, is entering the rapid expansion stage, both geographically and functionally. According to Gkonos, within the next year and a half, the group should have increased its scope of operation from 31 to 40 countries.
In terms of functional changes, the group has added a fully-fledged consultancy department. It operates independently from the publication department. Though it lives its own life, the company hopes consultancy attains the pervasive scope the publications department has in the years to come.
