After twenty years as a CEO of multinational businesses, Willie Pietersen is now a Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia Business School in New York.
Raised in South Africa, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and practiced law before embarking on an international business career. Between 1968 and 1996, he ran large divisions of several major global corporations, including: Unilever, where he accomplished a major turnaround as President of Lever Foods; The Seagram Company, where he was president of Seagram's US liquor business and Tropicana, America's largest orange juice company; and as president of Sterling Winthrop's Consumer Health Group, a global healthcare business with offices in 55 countries.
In 1998, Pietersen was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy, global competitiveness, and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia's executive education programs, and also in numerous corporation.
He has served as a teacher and advisor to many global companies, including Accenture, Aviva, Bausch & Lomb, Boeing, Chubb Corp., Deloitte, Eastman Chemical Co., Ericsson, Exxon Mobil, Henry Schein, Inc., Progress Energy, SAP and Sony. He is a member of the board of directors of Ruder-Finn.
Pietersen is the author of Reinventing Strategy published in April 2002 by John Wiley & Sons. His book, which offers a leadership framework for creating and implementing breakthrough strategies, is in its second printing in English and is also being translated into Spanish and Chinese.