First Try

[Originally published March 1, 2009]

As I said in the introduction to the blog, I have a number of areas in which I would like to contribute. First, it might help to know who I am and what I do. I am an American, transplanted 11 years to São Paulo, Brazil. By education, I am an urban planner. However, most of my career has been spent in commercial real estate development and business consulting. I have always been interested in entrepreneurial development and I’ve assisted a number of businesses to enter the market and survive. Now I teach the subject at a small MBA program in São Paulo called the Brazilian Business School. I also spent time as an advisor to a number of Democratic politicians in both New York and California. Since coming to Brazil, I have provided management consulting for a number of large and incipient companies as well as having run my own entrepreneurial business for 6 six--a security consulting firm. With the crisis, that business has now shut down and I’m focusing anew on business consulting.

Personally, I’m married and the devoted stepfather of 3 children and grandfather 10 grandkids spread between São Paulo and Israel. Beyond children and grandchildren in Israel, my wife has a large family, so we travel whenever possible to be with them. This makes me a fairly ardent Zionist and makes me very interested in both the Israeli economy and the politics of the country and the region.

The current crisis fascinates me as I have long taken a serious academic interest in crisis decision-making. My colleague at BBS, Ricardo Torres, and I are preparing a book on the crisis in Portuguese to try to explain how it came about to the Brazilian public and discuss its impact on the Brazilian economy.

I have been twittering for the past month, but 140 characters is a serious limit. It’s time to try my hand at a longer format.

I hope you enjoy these sporadic posts. Most will be in English; some will be in Portuguese. If you find them interesting, I will move the blog to a host that offers its own domain name and add more features. Let me know what you think. You can reach me at @jameshunterbr on Twitter and by e-mail. I look forward to hearing from you and to starting a dialog.

By the way, the photo is of smoggy, crowded São Paulo, taken from the balcony of our apartment.