Mary Farmer is the former Director at Glion Institute of Higher Education in Switzerland. She has many years of online teaching and curriculum design experience with universities around the globe, including the UBC Extended Learning Centre for Intercultural Communication. She frequently guest lectures at business schools in Europe and North America.
Mary has long experience as a consultant, executive and thought leader in global business. Her passion is around leadership, communication, people and talent development. She specializes in workplace innovation, creating high performing teams and inclusive working environments, maximizing organizational effectiveness, organizational learning and development and succession and workforce planning design. Former Global Director of Diversity and Inclusion for Philips in Amsterdam, she also served on the Global Advisory Board for Talent and Inclusion Strategy of Executive Networks, where she connected the enterprise heads of talent, diversity and inclusion from the largest corporations in the world. She is a member of the European Institute for Managing Diversity.
Following studies in Journalism and Cultural Anthropology, Mary holds an MBA in International Management from Leiden University and completed her doctoral research in Organizational Behaviour at the University of Amsterdam. She holds dual Canadian and Dutch citizenship and speaks fluent English, Dutch, Thai, and Bahasa Indonesia, and has working proficiency in Lao, Malay, and Flemish. She speaks ‘statistically bilingual’ Canadian French and a smattering of Mandarin and Spanish.