As your host, let me introduce myself.

Personal stats. I'm a "boomer," born and raised in the Heart of America, but I haven't lived there regularly since I left for Massachusetts to go to college. Married twice, the second to a man twenty years my senior. We were together for over twenty years until his death a few years ago. He had three sons, and we had no children together (with three boys of his own already, he figured he'd done his duty and I figured he was right!).

Professional background. For most of the past fifteen years I've been a senior staff member with multilateral financial institutions here in Washington DC. I specialize in financial sector development and the private sector. My focus has been emerging markets, especially securities markets, pension and mutual funds, the esoterica of trading systems and clearing and settlement, corporate governance (long before it became the flavor of the month), and legal reform.

Since 1990, I've been privileged to have had long advisory engagements with the governments of Chile and Russia. In both countries I worked closely with some terrific reformers on some fascinating projects. I've also been lucky to be involved with private sector investments or advice to governments in many other countries: China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Czech Republic, Poland, South Africa, Mozambique, West Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Central America.

Aside from working for clients, I've often had a large role in strategy and planning projects for my employers. It keeps me interested in B-school stuff, especially on strategy and organizational structure, staff development, and those hideous terms, "knowledge management" and "change management". The strategy work has surprisingly been quite helpful for my client work. There's a lot of potential for cross-fertilization between thinking about organizational change in business and institutional development in emerging markets.

An interest in developing countries wasn't my starting point. The job I've been doing didn't even exist when I went to college and law school, and when I started doing it in 1990 I kind of invented it.

I began my career as a deal lawyer with a big corporate firm, doing M&A and securities work. From there, a bit of venture capital and investment banking when "IPOs" was a term of art known only by the cognescenti.

I got into the development business when I was finishing a degree in international relations (focus Western Europe) in the late 80s, and a six-month consulting position came along. Since interviewing for jobs isn't my favorite passtime, I took the offer as an interim assignment until I found something else. As they say, the rest is history.

BTW -- I loved going back to school because I got so much more out of it the third time around. I had my own agenda, and I had a much richer framework to orient new information and ideas. If you have the chance, I highly recommend returning to school at least every decade or two. Like many things, graduate school is wasted on the young.

I've recently left my regular job for health reasons -- nothing fatal or crippling, just interfering with a predictable and full-time schedule -- and I'm now taking on consulting projects that can be done at my own pace. That leaves me some time to devote to this experiment.

I share my house with family members (who live in DC part-time). My life is otherwise ruled by Katya and Nadya, a Westie and Min. Schnauzer, respectively. (Yes, "Nadya" is Nadezhda.) You'll be relieved to know I don't own a camera.

Welcome!