About this ebook
Discover more
About the author
Sylvia L Garcia is an international business communication consultant and the founder of Global Comm Partners, a training firm that has helped professionals from over forty countries improve their English communication skills for corporate and academic settings. With more than two decades of experience in language education and cross-cultural training, she has designed and delivered programs for Fortune 500 companies including Siemens, Samsung, and Accenture, as well as for United Nations agencies and multilateral development banks.
Ms. Garcia holds a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the University of Chicago. She began her career teaching English as a second language at the American Language Center in Cairo, Egypt, where she first recognized that traditional ESL curricula rarely addressed the real communication challenges professionals face in international business. That insight led her to develop the scenario-based methodology that forms the foundation of this book and her training practice.
Over the years, Ms. Garcia has trained engineers at a German automotive manufacturer to lead design reviews in English, coached executives at a Brazilian mining company through high-stakes investor presentations, and helped a team of Japanese project managers navigate the cultural and linguistic dimensions of a joint venture with an American partner. She has delivered workshops in twenty-three countries and has trained over six thousand professionals across industries including finance, technology, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing.
Ms. Garcia is a frequent speaker at international conferences on business communication and cross-cultural management, including the International TESOL Convention and the Society for Human Resource Management Annual Conference. Her writing has appeared in *Training Magazine*, *Harvard Business Review* online, and the *TESOL Quarterly*.
She currently divides her time between São Paulo, Brazil, and Barcelona, Spain, and continues to work directly with clients in a dozen languages—though, she would be the first to admit, she speaks only two of them with any real competence. The others, she says, have taught her the most important lesson she brings to her work: that the courage to communicate imperfectly is worth more than the most polished grammar.
