Stephen Blank's impressive career has combined both international business and education. As a founding partner of Multinational Strategies, Inc. and Stephen Blank Associates, he has helped clients with international business issues and with development of corporate systems to manage external environmental information and assessments. Most recently, he has consulted with Kansas City, Missouri's Office of International Affairs and Trade on the city's North American trade strategy.
He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books and many articles. The main theme of his research over the years - beginning with his study of the Federation of British Industries then his work on multinational corporations and host countries and, most recently, North American economic integration - has been the relationship between government and business, the interface of public policy and corporate strategy. He has written widely on Canada and North American developments, and he appears frequently on radio and television and as a speaker at conferences and meetings. He has toured Canada for the United States Information Service's American Participant Program and, for a decade, headed the Canadian Affairs program at the Americas Society - Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Dr. Blank has written extensively on corporate strategy in North America, including Making NAFTA Work; U.S. Firms and the New North American Business Environment.
As a member of The Conference Board from 1975 to 1980, Blank headed the Board's Multinational Corporate Conduct Project and then served as Director of its International Political and Social Analysis Program. He and his colleagues authored five Conference Board reports on aspects of multinational corporation-host country relations and on how companies assess the non-market aspects of overseas investment environments.
Before joining the faculty at Pace University, Dr. Blank taught at in the Departments of Political Science at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been Professor of International Business and Management at Pace University's Lubin School of Business since 1985 and served as Director of the Lubin Center for International Business Development from 1998 to 2004.
Between 1969 and 1974, Dr. Blank was the Executive Director of the Council for European Studies, an inter-university consortium of Western European Studies Programs. In 1974-75, he was an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London). He was a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbeloni in Bellagio, Italy in 1976. In 1998, he was a founder of the PanAmerican Partnership for Business Education, an alliance of four North American business schools and serves as the Partnership's Managing Director.
He has been a visiting professor at major universities, including the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College; Yale University's School of Organisation and Management; the Faculty of Commerce, University of British Columbia; the MBA Program, International University of Japan; the Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University and HEC-Montreal. Dr. Blank was Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School for International and Public Affairs, Adjunct Senior Research Associate of the North-South Center at the University of Miami and Claude Bissell Visiting Professor of US-Canada Relations at the University of Toronto. In 2004, he was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Professorship (associated with the Chair of American Political and Economic Studies) at the University of Montreal.
As Director of the PanAmerican Partnership for Business Education, Stephen Blank has redirected his primary attention to building new teaching resources for the study of North American economic integration. More than 500 MBA students from the four members of the partnership took part in courses on NAFTA and in-depth study visits to New York and Monterrey-Mexico City. Research projects sponsored by the Partnership examined the financial and economic impact of North American integration; mapped "the new North American reality;" studied Quebec in North America; and brought together a wide array of specialists from transportation institutes, universities and firms to study transportation, logistics and supply chain management in North America. Currently, the Partnership is sponsoring a project to produce case studies of how companies organize and manage their North American operations.
Stephen Blank has served as President of the Mid-Atlantic Club of New York and as a member of the board of Refugees International. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Higher Education in North America, the Board of Advisors of the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York and the Professional Advisory Council of the G8 Research Group. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Blank received degrees at Dartmouth College (BA, 1961), Cambridge University (Certificate in Historical Studies, 1963) and Harvard University (MA, 1966 and PhD, 1968). In September 2001, Stephen Blank was awarded l'Ordre National du Quebec.