Whether guiding Russian billionaires through their first brushes with the international media, or acting as Washington-based public spokeswoman for a leading global brand under legal attack, Eugenia Harrison has operated without borders since long before joining Bell Pottinger Sans Frontières.
The quintessential international communications advisor, Harrison is Russian by birth, Irish by marriage but global by profession. Having lived and worked both in Washington, DC, and for the past decade in London – all the time continuing to commute regularly to Russia – she is part of what helps Bell Pottinger Sans Frontières excel at what it does.
"Most people underestimate the cultural barriers of doing business internationally," she says. "No more so than in communications. Imagine: dealing with tough-minded, inquisitive journalists is difficult enough. But in another language, from a foreign media culture?"
As illustration, she recalls introducing the famously publicity-shy Roman Abramovich for his first ever extended session with a western interviewer. This was not in Moscow, headquarters for Abramovich’s varied businesses, or in London, where years later he would become the headline-grabbing owner of Chelsea Football Club. Instead, the setting was the easternmost edge of Siberia, in wind-swept, icebound Chukotka, near the Bering Strait, where Abramovich was running for governor.
The resulting major profile has formed an accurate basis for much of the media profiling of the now-famous businessman ever since.
Harrison did not start out to be a consultant or an international media advisor. In fact, her career began as an academic, lecturing at a top Moscow economics institute while earning her PhD.
Then, after marriage and a move to the US, she happened to be at the right place at the right time to become spokeswoman for a major international spirits brand facing trademark challenges back in Russia. With that, she began several years of trans-Atlantic commuting, helping a multinational PR and legal team pursue the case.
Ultimately, she settled in London, only to be hired first as a consultant, and then full-time, to advise the CEO of one of the world's major aluminium companies, RUSAL, on corporate communications. She designed and ran a global programme encompassing activities in such far-flung locations as Jamaica, Nigeria, Guinea and Australia, as well as across Western Europe and the US. In other words, her jet-setting days were far from over.
Her itinerant professional life blends well with an equally mobile personal life. When not home in London, enjoying walks with her beloved bulldog Sasha (named after a client of course) she likes frequent jaunts to Paris, Milan or Barcelona. "I love London," she says. "But I love it most of all for its proximity to everything else."
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