Bill Plummer

A former U.S. diplomat and 20-year information and communications technology (ICT) industry executive, as of July, 2022, Bill is/was the Founder and Principal at Birch and Pine, LLC, a strategic communications consultancy, having led communications and external affairs teams at multinational giants like Nokia and Huawei, as well as dynamic ICT upstarts like election technology leader Smartmatic and JMA Wireless. Well-known and respected by global business and financial media and key ICT trade publications, Bill has been interviewed, quoted and profiled across virtually every platform - print, broadcast and online - ranging from the Financial Times to Bloomberg, from the Washington Post to the NYT, from Caixin to the South China Morning Post, from CNET to PC Mag, from MSNBC to 60 Minutes, and beyond. On the personal front, Bill is a proud father of eight and grandfather of four. He currently lives with his partner Tammi near Seattle, Washington. A long-displaced native of Seattle - having lived in Munich, Germany Washington, D.C., Guayaquil, Ecuador, White Plains, NY, and Syracuse, NY since leaving the Pacific Northwest in 1979 - Bill returned to his geographic roots (and childhood sweetheart) after a particularly harrowing experience with Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Currently working on an as-yet-untitled fictional dystopian novel, Bill's first book Huidu - Inside Huawei offers a detailed non-fiction account of his eight years with the China-based multinational and his ongoing battle to secure market access for the beleaguered giant. Bill's second publication - a novella titled Five Weeks and a Lifetime Later - focuses on the first year of the Covid pandemic, including detailed accounting of his two-week intubation and five weeks stay at Johns Hopkins.