Business Without Borders
Four alumni who personify global leadership done right
By Pat Morden
Photography by Shaun Robinson (Calgary), Sophia Bennett (Geneva) and Ike Edeani (New York)
In January 2025, the world was turned upside down with the launch of the U.S. trade war. Many called it the end of globalization. Canada responded by focusing on diversifying trading partners and reducing inter-provincial trade barriers,
But there’s a special breed of leaders who don’t wait for a crisis to think global. They move wherever interesting work takes them and relish the opportunity to have a global impact.
A Passion for the Planet, A Gift for Connection
Charles Newton Price, MBA ’09, is one of those leaders. After graduating from Ivey, he became a consultant and then founded a company that provides credit cards for international students. Along the way, he became passionate about finding solutions to the climate crisis and the role of Indigenous peoples in the transition to a regenerative society. He traveled widely, from the U.S. and Europe to the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, South America, Southeast Asia, Ghana, and beyond, often meeting and learning from Indigenous people. Wherever he went he saw people doing innovative work to address climate challenges but struggling to connect with others who shared the same interests.
He spent time with a small think tank, Future Horizons, exploring the intersection of climate, nature, and business. Then, in 2024, he was approached by the founders of Greentech Alliance to become its CEO. Founded in Germany in 2020, Greentech Alliance was a volunteer-driven non-profit helping connect investors with promising new climate technologies. “They were quite successful with what they were doing but recognized that they needed someone to take it to the next level,” says Newton Price. “For me, it was a way of putting everything I was doing together in a way that made sense.”
Newton Price was in New Zealand when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered his remarkable “middle powers” speech in Davos, Switzerland. His colleagues at Greentech Alliance called him immediately and urged him to announce that the organization was expanding to Canada. He registered the organization as a non-profit in Canada, developed a paid membership business model, and embedded Indigenous partnerships as a key part of the organization’s programming. While Greentech Alliance transitions to the new model, it is moving ahead, building a network of Canadian investors, running an Indigenous youth exchange program, advocating for a regenerative economy, and presenting workshops and lectures. Recently, the Alliance organized the first ever Climate Week in Calgary, Alberta.
Newton Price’s work is driven by a deep sense of purpose and focus.
There is no question that the transition to a regenerative economy must happen, and we need to share it with as many people as possible.”
He also has a talent for making human connections and building collaborations across cultures and geographies. “We have to keep connecting people with one another,” he says. “I see the world as almost without borders – we are all the same.”
Fuelling Global Collaboration to Save Lives
Teddy Kuhn, HBA ’11, is also a global bridge builder. His international career started when he was working as a consultant with BCG. “I think I was always searching for a way to take the Ivey skill set and bring it to purposes with a social impact,” he says. The opportunity came when he saw a notice about a secondment to the United Nations World Food Programme. He packed up and was on his way to Rome within a week, launching a career focused on improving the effectiveness of multilateral institutions. He moved on to work with the Global Fund, an organization that invests billions in developing countries to defeat HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. There he worked in the office of the Executive Director, launching the organization’s performance management function to monitor progress and advise senior leadership on course-correction to improve impact.
Now he’s working with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private global health partnership created in 2000 to increase access to life-saving vaccines for children in the world's poorest countries. Since it was founded, Gavi has vaccinated 1.2 billion children, helping to reduce childhood mortality by half in low-income countries. His work focuses on one of the most complex challenges in global health: improving how governments, UN agencies, civil society organizations, and private-sector partners work together to deliver greater impact. He has led initiatives to strengthen Gavi’s grant design, partnership architecture, and cross-partner performance dialogues.
Given the number of stakeholders in global health, Kuhn says his work requires a delicate balance between consultation and action.
There’s real power in bringing together organizations with different perspectives and strengths to solve problems that none could tackle alone. That takes time and patience, without losing focus on the need for action and urgency.”
Kuhn says humility is also critical in managing across cultures and organizations. “Nobody has all the answers,” he says. “At Gavi, we have to remember that the real expertise lies with the in-country practitioners and impacted communities – they have the experience, they understand the context, and they know what’s needed. If we can enable and support them, we’ll get the best solutions.”
Growing Spotify
From Wall Street investment analyst to corporate strategist for a global music streaming giant, the career of Sheila Spence, HBA ’91, traces a path she describes as “less a random leap than a carefully dedicated path.” After graduating from Ivey, Spence began her career as an analyst for Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s most storied investment banks. She completed an MBA at Harvard Business School, and then joined Primedia, a publishing and events business owned by private equity firm KPR. There, she found her niche as an expert in corporate development and strategy. After 10 years, she was eager for a bigger stage in a more complex industry, and was tapped to lead corporate development at WPP, the largest advertising and marketing services company in the world. The 50-plus acquisitions and strategic investments she authored there were critical for positioning the company for the digital future.
From there, Spence moved to Spotify, the Sweden-based music streaming service which had 300 million subscribers at the time. This time, she built the corporate development function and team from the ground up, which led to the company’s bold moves to expand beyond its music core through strategic acquisitions into new categories -- podcasts, audiobooks, AI voice and more.
Spence travelled widely during her time with WPP and Spotify, seeking acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe. “Once a transaction gets pretty serious, you really want to be on site with the company, to see the team in their own environment,” she says. “I never shied away from travel because it always added more richness to the experience.”
Thinking Ahead
Global companies like WPP and Spotify must be thinking not just two or three years out, but 10 years ahead, Spence says. “You need to have a belief about where consumer demand is heading and then make the strategic bets that will position you to capture it.” At WPP, that meant investing in the capabilities to win in a rapidly digitizing world, strengthening the company’s offer to the biggest global marketers. “You have to be there to catch the rain when it falls,” she says. For Spotify, it meant investing in content categories and technologies that would deepen engagement and expand the platform’s relevance for the next generation of listeners worldwide. A follow-on effect of Spotify’s reach into high-growth regional markets, she points out, is the worldwide popularity of music genres like reggaeton and K-pop.
A key component of Spence’s success at Spotify was building and maintaining relationships with peers across the company. “That’s not always easy, given they’re in different time zones, with many competing priorities, but it was essential to driving new strategic growth at a global company level.” By the time she left in 2025, Spotify had grown to 750+ million users with a market cap of more than $150 billion. Spence now advises a variety of early-stage companies.
Staying Focused
Like Newton Price and Kuhn, Spence points to the importance of staying on strategy in a global enterprise.
I constantly checked myself to make sure the projects I was working on were truly aligned with the company’s strategy, and to make sure that my team’s energies were focused on the highest priorities.”
Equally important was building and nurturing a strong team, especially across geographies. “It’s the most rewarding investment you can make with your time, because it’s creating the foundation that will propel their contributions to the company and advance their careers.”
Spence reflects that her global career success came through a combination of focus, people, and timing. “They say timing is everything,” she says. “But you can’t take advantage of timing if you haven’t got the focus, the networks, and the strategic understanding to move when the moment comes.”
Building a Global Business with New Tech
After his Ivey program, Vivek Morzaria, HBA ’13, wasted no time going global. He moved from London, Canada to London, England, where he worked for International Hotels Group (IHG). From there, he moved across the Channel to Amsterdam to join Uber. “I really valued that experience,” he says. “On the business development team, I got to work on deals across multiple facets of the business – payments, riders, drivers – and covered everywhere from Europe to the Middle East and Russia. A lot of the things I was put in charge with were simply a function of the fact there was no-one else to do them!”
Then it was on to San Francisco to take a job with Lime, a scooter and bike sharing startup that now operates in 30 countries and 230 cities. The next stop was New York, where he joined OpenSea, an NFT company, and then Zero Hash, a crypto payments company.
“I find myself consistently drawn to companies that are operating at the intersection of new technology and regulatory change,” Morzaria says. Eighteen months ago, that interest led him to become a co-founder in Latitude Global Inc, an innovative payment company that enables cross border payments using stablecoins in the background to enable instant settlement at lower cost.
Starting Latitude with my co-founders let me explore how stablecoins can be used alongside and instead of traditional payment rails. We hope that by lowering costs and making payments instant, we can make it easier for small businesses and creators to go global.”
Morzaria says the relationships he built along his peripatetic career path have been critical to his success. “People pull you up and push you into new roles, and that’s been tremendously valuable for me,” he says. “I’ve come to realize that global networks are smaller than I thought they’d be!” His global experience has also taught him about the differences in business culture from one country to another, something that’s critical in dealing with partners, customers, and employees at Latitude. “In the U.S., meetings tend to be structured, direct, and right to the point,” he says. “In some other regions, there’s a longer courtship involved. Partnerships form much faster in the U.S., but the ability to go deeper and longer exists when you have a deeper foundation.”
The Right Team, The Right Time
Working with the right people is key to building a global enterprise with speed, he says. “You have to have an exemplary team that you love spending time with. I’m proud that our team is working very productively together.” The right idea at the right time also helps: Morzaria says he and his co-founders raised an $8 million seed round just as stablecoins were becoming a mainstream topic for large fintech companies. While advances to technology have made it easier to operate internationally, Morzaria believes in the value of meeting face to face. At Latitude, for example, the leadership team meets in person on a quarterly basis, in New York, San Francisco, Texas, or London, U.K.
He advises business leaders interested in building global careers to move as close as possible to the heart of the industry they want to enter. He made the move to San Francisco because he wanted to work in tech and found his job when he got there. “The opportunities that come from being at the centre are so much higher.” As his career trajectory suggests, he is a fan of taking risks and exploring opportunities with early stage, high growth companies. “The learning experience is invaluable.”
Morzaria, Spence, Kuhn and Newton Price are truly global citizens. Their enterprises operate seamlessly across borders, building resilience that goes beyond the news cycle. Regardless of the industry, these leaders have the vision, perspective, energy, and flexibility to make things happen, anywhere and everywhere. “Large global organizations attract incredible people, smart and deeply passionate, who bring diverse perspectives,” Kuhn says. “It’s inspiring in this current global climate to work with organizations that are impactful and prove we can work together to create good things.”