Vice Provost Coauthors Winner of Paris Book Festival Award for Non-Fiction

Ambassador Tibor Nagy, colleague write book on managing operations in difficult international environments.

Tibor Nagy

A timely look at solutions for managing operations in difficult international environments won this year’s Paris Book Festival award for non-fiction. Texas Tech University Vice Provost Tibor Nagy teamed with a colleague to write, “Managing Overseas Operations: Kiss Your Latte Goodbye.”

Ambassador Nagy, Texas Tech vice provost for international affairs, and Ambassador Gregory Engle, Peace Corps director for Ethiopia, coauthored the volume, which gives practical advice to managers to prepare them for working in international environments. The two are friends for decades and both spent much of their careers as diplomats in a variety of places across the world.

Managing Overseas Operations: Kiss Your Latte Goodbye” discusses what to look for when you’re going abroad.

“Topics include how to establish operations, cultural and practical factors to get work done effectively, and then how to respond when bad things happen,” Nagy said.

The nonfiction book is written for businesses, business classes, nongovernmental organizations, mission organizations and nonprofits sending people for the first time to developing countries across the world.

Nagy and Engle use their real world experience to provide anecdotes throughout the book. The book is organized to resemble one day’s worth of meetings where the two colleagues alternate briefing the outgoing manager. Each chapter looks at a possible scenario for overseas, provides anecdotes and then outlines principles guiding managers toward successful outcomes in different cultures.

The book received the award for nonfiction by the Paris Book Festival, a competition where submitted works are judged by a panel of publishing industry experts looking for authors’ passion for telling a story and the potential for the work to gain a worldwide audience.

The award ceremony is May 27 in Paris.

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