Premiere Speakers Bureau

Tim Clark is an internationally recognized expert on Japan-related business, entrepreneurship, and localization issues. His involvement in things Japanese stretches back to 1984, when he began his career as a Japanese-to-English translator. He spent a decade in Japan working for Japanese, Chinese, and U.S. corporations: both startups and Fortune 100 conglomerates.

But Clark always seemed destined for a career in entrepreneurship. Bill Gates was a teammate on his Seattle football team, and during his Stanford days he lived at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, the house where Hewlett and Packard had their first garage/workshop. So in 1994 he founded a pioneering marketing and research consultancy that helped U.S. and European firms penetrate the Japan, Taiwan, and Korea markets using online channels. The company was acquired six years later by a NASDAQ-listed corporation.

Hard-won entrepreneurial experience--and hard-hitting insights from his consulting and localization work--shine through in Clark's speaking and writing. He has presented to enthusiastic business, government, and academic audiences--in English and in Japanese--throughout Europe, North America, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific region for the last twelve years. Clients have included Amazon.com, Duty Free Shoppers, General Motors, Lucent Technologies, PeopleSoft, and United Media, among others. Clark has also been a guest speaker at a dozen universities in the U.S. and abroad, including the University of Chicago Graduate School Business and Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

Clark wrote The Swordless Samurai (St. Martin's Press, 2007), a leadership parable based on the extraordinary life of Hideyoshi, Japan's first peasant-turned-samurai king, who favored negotiation over force in his astonishing unification of Asia's most powerful nation. He also authored Saying Yes to Japan: How Outsiders Are Reviving a Trillion Dollar Services Market, which details opportunities in Japan's multi-trillion dollar domestic service sector (a Japanese language version of Saying Yes to Japan was released in summer 2006 by Nikkei, Japan's largest business publisher). In addition, Clark has written over 100 articles, which have appeared in the New York Times, Asiaweek, The International Herald Tribune, Japan Media Review, and other publications.

Today Clark teaches entrepreneurship in the Master of International Management (MIM) program at Portland State University, North America's first Asia-focused graduate level business program, and serves as an adviser to Tokyo-based venture capital firm SunBridge. He holds BA and MBA degrees from Stanford University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and travels from Portland, Oregon, where he resides with his wife and two children.