WorldCity Business Magazine

01 Publisher's Note

by Ken Roberts

I reconnected with Donn Atkins at one of our recent monthly Connections events. Donn had been head of IBM Latin America from 1999 to 2003 before taking on global sales responsibilities from the corporate offices in New York.

Now, he has left IBM to put his three decades of experience to work in his own consulting firm, and decided South Florida was where he wanted to be. I had introduced Donn to Roberto Alonso at the Connections event. Roberto had recently retired from Yahoo I always experience a tinge of envy when I hear about relatively young people retiring from internet or technology companies and invited Donn to attend a Chile-U.S. Chamber of Commerce event with him. There, Donn told me last month, he met a couple of interesting technology companies up from Chile. Might turn into some business.

There are two points to this story. The first is that in tough times, in times like we find ourselves now, shaking hands and showing your face is more important than in good times. That is the reason we are inaugurating the International Organization Directory in this issue, to our knowledge the most thorough such listing ever published. A keeper, as we call it in the business.

We have listed more than 150 organizations in South Florida that are completely international or have a strong international component. If you are not a member of one, ring one up and join.
The second point of the story is that Donn and Robert are going to play an important role in WorldCitys development plans. In addition to this publication and a boatload of TradeNumbers publications that circulate here and around the country, we currently host two event series the aforementioned Connections and our 3-yearold CEO Roundtable. (Do a search on our website, www.worldcityweb.com to learn more about them.)

Now, we are working to launch a series of vertical event series for the heads of marketing for the 1,200 multinationals in South Florida, for the heads of technology at these companies, for the heads of human resources and government affairs and relaunch another for the international trade community. We also just launched an every-other-month luncheon for those heads of multinational operations who have been a part of our CEO Roundtable series.

Its all about getting people together who can help each other. We already have almost 500 heads of marketing in our database and are now in the process of contacting your company and the other 1,200 multinationals in our Whos Here database, asking if you have the other positions. If you are the head of a multinational office here, you should have received an email from me seeking this information.

If you didnt or if you work in one of these vertical areas, feel free to shoot me an email if you are interested in learning more. But back to Donn and Roberto. They are going to help us with the
technology series. For them, and for us, the opportunity arose because they showed their faces and I shook their hands at a recent Connections event. There was a certain serendipity to it.

You can register for our July Connections event at our website. Its on Latin Titans, and is sure to be another great opportunity not just to learn about some leading Latin American companies with
operations here but maybe make that one connection that opens a door that leads to a new relationship.

Contact: kroberts@worldcityweb.com