I have created this website so that anyone interested can learn more about my international management career than can be found in my Curriculum Vitae. My CV is on the website, of course, and can be downloaded easily. Although it is a lengthy CV, it offers only the briefest of summaries of a complex career. My CV provides information on what I have done and where, but it does not address the questions of how or why. Answers to these questions can be found here.
Even for my colleagues in international development, my career is different because of the variety of technical areas in which I have worked. To those unfamiliar with the work of international development, my career must appear to be exotic. Even the job titles are unique to a small segment of my profession: "Chief of Party" for example. Neither international businessmen nor European and Asian development professionals know the meaning of this job title, so I will explain it in this introduction to my web site.
A Chief of Party (COP) is the managing director of an international development project funded by the United States Agency for International Development. He has sole responsibility and authority for the execution of a development contract. Accordingly, when he is the only expatriate on a development project, he combines the roles of chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief technical officer, and chief administrative officer. In larger projects, the COP remains the chief executive officer, but can delegate some or all of the other responsibilities to a Deputy Chief of Party. A COP must also be a diplomat, and in fact often has semi-diplomatic status. In an international development project, the COP is responsible to the company that hired him for the successful execution of the contract. He is responsible to the funding agency for work supporting program objectives that may change after the contract is awarded and work plan approved. He is responsible to host country governments for meeting their needs and their perceptions of what the development project is supposed to do and accomplish. Serving three masters is even more difficult than serving two.
I hope that you find the material I have provided in my web site informative and entertaining. Thank you for your visit. If you have any questions, I will be happy to respond to them.
Russell J. Dionne
