For twenty years these two academics, a cross-cultural Anglo-Dutch partnership, have been interviewing managers around the world, giving them questionnaires to answer, conducting seminars and advising their companies.
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| Fons Trompenaar |
Most of the management theory we know about has come from the Anglo-American culture, the one that most of these gurus belong to. This is a universalist culture, one that assumes that the rules that work for it will work universally. That might be a dangerous illusion. After all, we know that things work quite differently but equally well in other parts of the world.
Trompenaars and Hampden Turner discovered that North Americans and North Europeans were almost totally universalist in their responses. They would put the law first. Only 70 per cent of the French and the Japanese would do so, however, while, in Venezuela, two thirds would be particularist in their response.
Universalist countries take contracts very seriously and they employ lots of lawyers to make sure that the contract is kept. Particularist countries think that the relationship is more important than the contract and that a good deal requires no written contract - the particular people and the particular situation matter more than the universal rules.
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| Charles Hampden Turner |
The answer to the dilemma, say Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, is to reconcile the opposites, to recognize that the cultures need each other.
Biography:
Trompenaars spent eight years with Shell, where he ended up working on a culture-related project, and then worked part-time for the company before founding the Center for International Business Studies.
The British academic Charles Hampden Turner is Trompenaars' long-term collaborator together they founded the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group..
Their work is based around exhaustive and meticulous research. The book which first established Trompenaars' reputation was 'Riding the Waves of Culture' (1993).
Since then he and Hampden Turner have written 'Mastering the Infinite Game' looking at differences in Western and Eastern values and the '7 Cultures of Capitalism' (1995).
Most recently, the duo have produced 'Building Cross-Cultural Competence' which argues that foreign cultures are not arbitrarily or randomly different but mirror images of each other's values.
Bibliography:
- The Seven Cultures of Capitalism: Value Systems for Creating Wealth in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands
with Charles Hampden-Turner (1995)
- Riding The WavesRiding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business
with Charles Hampden-Turner (1997)
- Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values
with Charles Hampden-Turner and David Lewis (2000) - 21 Leaders for The 21st Century
Charles Hampden-Turner (2001)
- Mastering the Infinite Game: How East Asian Values are Transforming Business Practices
with Charles Hampden-Turner (2001) - Did the Pedestrian Die: Insights from the World's Greatest Culture Guru
(2003)
- Business Across Cultures (Culture for Business Series)
with Peter Woolliams (2004)
- Managing People Across Cultures (Culture for Business Series)
with Charles Hampden-Turner (2004)
- Marketing Across Cultures (Culture for Business Series)
with Peter Woolliams (2004)
- Managing Change Across Corporate Cultures (Culture for Business Series)
with Peter Prud'homme (2005)
- Servant-Leadership Across Cultures: Harnessing the Strengths of the World's Most Powerful Management Philosophy
with Ed Voerman (2009)
- The Enlightened Leader: An Introduction to the Chakras of Leadership
with Peter Ten Hoopen (2009)
- Riding the Waves of Innovation: Harness the Power of Global Culture to Drive Creativity and Growth
with Charles Hampden-Turner (2010) - The Global M&A Tango: How to Reconcile Cultural Differences in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Strategic Partnerships
(2010)
- Innovating in a Global Crisis: Riding the Whirlwind of Recession. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner
