Biography

Eden Collinsworth is a former media executive and business consultant. She was president of Arbor House Publishing Co. and founder of the Los Angeles-based monthly lifestyle magazine, BUZZ, before becoming a vice president at Hearst Corporation. She served as the chief operating officer and chief-of-staff at the EastWest Institute, a global think tank. After writing a bestselling book in China for Chinese businessmen on Western deportment, she launched Collinsworth & Associates, a Beijing-based consulting company, which specialized in intercultural communication. She is the author of a novel, It Might Have Been What He Said; of a play, The Strangeness of Men and Women; of a memoir, I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson; and of Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business. and What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait.

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At the age of twenty-eight, Eden Collinsworth was cited as one of “Ten People to Watch” by Fortune magazine when she was named president and publisher of Arbor House Book Publishing Company, owned by the Hearst Corporation.

Recognized as a leader in the publishing industry by the New York Times, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Collinsworth left the book business in 1990 to launch the Los Angeles-based monthly lifestyle magazine, BUZZ. As its founding president and CEO, she shepherded BUZZ through ten years of growth by entering into agreements with National Public Radio, Paramount Studios, and CBS-TV. BUZZ was nominated for a National Magazine Award the year it was sold to Cap-Cities/ABC. In the third decade of her career, she was vice president and director of Cross Media Business Development at the Hearst Corporation, responsible for identifying and pursuing development opportunities, which crossed all of Hearst’s divisions, including magazines, newspapers, broadcast, and syndication.

In 2008, Collinsworth became vice president, chief operating officer, and chief-of-staff of The EastWest Institute, an international think tank acknowledged for bringing together business, civil society, and public sector individuals in order to shape practical solutions to global security threats. She was accountable for all operations, including the day-to-day performance of staff in New York, Brussels, Washington, D.C., and Moscow. In 2011, she launched Collinsworth & Associates, a Beijing-based consulting company which specialized in intercultural communication.

She is the author of a bestselling book on Western Business Deportment for the Chinese, published by Beijing Xiron Books Co., Ltd., one of the largest independent publishers in China. The Personal Guide to Effective Business Etiquette in Today’s Global World is currently used as a textbook in the MBA program at Peking University, where she also lectures. Profiled in Lunch with the FT, which was included in the Viking anthology Lunch with the FT: 52 Classic Interviews, she has also been featured on the BBC and CNN.

Collinsworth is the author of a novel, It Might Have Been What He Said; of a play, The Strangeness of Men and Women; of a memoir, I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson; and of Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business and What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait.

Photo by Juliana Johnston