Brigitte Opel

BrIgitte Opel

Brigitte Opel uses her experiences from an international career and extensive travels to prepare her clients for the challenges of global business. She shares her curiosity and her passion in interactive sessions on general as well as specific questions – in English, German or Dutch.

 

 

WORKED AND LIVED IN
Netherlands, Germany, USA

LANGUAGES
Dutch, English, German, Austrian

TRAVELS FROM
The Netherlands

ABOUT

Brigitte has been a consultant for cross-cultural management since 2013.

Born and raised in Germany, she quickly started exploring the world by learning foreign languages and immersing in other cultures. She has lived, studied and worked in Germany, Netherlands, Japan, USA, Australia and Russia and visited many more. After her studies at Thunderbird School of International Management (USA and Japan) and a career as international project and people manager at IBM, she decided to combine her professional and personal global experiences with the Hofstede model on National Cultures.

Besides consulting on cultural awareness in general, she has helped clients prepare for negotiations with international partners, improve the communication in a virtual team, develop sales presentations to foreign customers and gain sensitivity on different communication styles. In individual coaching sessions, she also helped expats to learn about the country culture of their next assignment. She has lectured at many Dutch universities on various aspects of National Culture (Communication, advertising, teamwork, sports, Brexit etc).

Honours and Awards 

  • Founding member of Connect2us Foundation
  • Member of DNHK (Dutch-German Chamber of Commerce)
  • Member of Sietar Netherlands
  • Award from the Netherlands Logistics Society
  • Coaching from IBM academy
  • Leadership from IBM academy
  • PMP Project Management

TESTIMONIALs

I attended the course you ran for PWN (Professional Womens Network) and have used the insights I gleaned about the Dutch culture in my sessions with RBS Netherlands. Really helpful, thanks Brigitte! Recommend this course for anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of working cross culturally.

Joanna Polak-Goodman

@CitiesChallenge (IBM) thank you Brigitte for insights in cultural differences.

Warner Dijkhuizen

Truly excellent workshop, very well presented and informative. It’s an interesting topic and she had some interesting insights and theory. I really enjoyed the historic examples of how prejudice developed, that helps to overcome them.

Students at TU Delft