Prior to coming to the University of South Carolina in August 2016, he was Professor of International Management at the MYRA School of Business in Mysore (India), and Director of GloBus Research.

[2][3][4] Wolfgang Messner is the author and co-editor of several business books, including: The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Continuous Business Transformation (co-edited with Horst Ellermann and Peter Kreutter; Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Winning the Right Job (co-authored with Pratibha Messner; Pan MacMillan, 2015), Making the Compelling Business Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),[5] Globalization of Professional Services (co-edited with Ulrich Bäumer and Peter Kreutter; Springer, 2012), Intelligent IT Offshoring to India (Springer, 2010), Working with India (Springer, 2009), and Rightshore!

During a one-year expatriate assignment, he delivered the Euro conversion project with his team at the bank's captive unit in Bangalore (India).

He headed various business change projects in global and medium-sized financial services institutions and investment banks in Central Europe with a focus on getting value out of their customer relationship management programs, processes, and supporting system.

While initially a Principal and responsible for board-level mandated consulting projects around customer service excellence and operations, he moved to India for 2.5 years on an expatriate assignment as Director to ramp up the offshore application development and maintenance service delivery for Central Europe.