Fons Trompenaars > Quotes

“A fish only discovers its need for
water when it is no longer in it.
Our own culture is like
water to a fish.
It sustains us.”
― Fons Trompenaars

“We introduced the fourth R, for Realization, in this edition, so that culture is ever more explicitly linked to the bottom line.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Eliminate factors in your industry that no longer have value; Reduce factors that over-serve customers and increase cost structure for no gain; Raise factors that remove compromises buyers must make; Create factors that add new sources of value.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“culture.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“The latter more than ever need to interact with a diverse workforce, as well as with a diverse customer and supplier base, and therefore require a certain level of cultural competence.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Rs of Recognition, Respect, and Reconciliation”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Studies of cultures are now further clouded by the consequences of migrations, immigration and acculturation, and cultural differences across generations, along with new players such as India and South America as well as China in the center stage. This”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“responses to our deductive assessments of intercultural competence and transcultural leadership, corporate effectiveness and sustainability, cultural aspects of personality and team development, and innovation.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Buytendijk, F. (2010) Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short, New York, John Wiley. Hampden-Turner, C. (1990) Charting the Corporate Mind: Graphic Solutions to Business Conflicts, New York, The Free Press. Trompenaars, F., Woolliams, P. (2009) ‘Towards a Generic Framework of Competence for Today’s Global Village’, in: The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, ed. D.K. Deardorff, Thousand Oaks, Sage.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“Planning – ‘Listen and learn’: Ensure commitment to get the business social. Presence – ‘Stake our claim’: Evolution from planning to action, establishing a formal and informed presence in social media; Engagement – ‘Dialogue deepens relationships’: Commitment where social media is seen as a critical element in relationship-building; Formalized – ‘Organize for scale’: A formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor, creating a centre of excellence and establishing organization-wide governance; Strategic – ‘Become a social business’: Social media initiatives gain visibility and real business impact. Converged – ‘Business to social’: Having cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“MODEL 2: Multiple Stakeholder Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010) PROBLEM STATEMENT How can I assess the most significant organizational dilemmas resulting from conflicting stakeholder demands and also assess organizational priorities to create sustainable performance? ESSENCE Organizational sustainability is not limited to the fashionable environmental factors such as emissions, green energy, saving scarce resources, corporate social responsibility, and so on. The future strength of an organization depends on the way leadership and management deal with the tensions between the five major entities facing any organization: efficiency of business processes, people, clients, shareholders and society. The manner in which these tensions are addressed and resolved determines the future strength and opportunities of an organization. This model proposes that sustainability can be defined as the degree to which an organization is capable of creating long-term wealth by reconciling its most important (‘golden’) dilemmas, created between these five components. From this, professors and consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams have identified ten dimensions consisting of dilemmas formed from these five components, because each one competes with the other four. HOW TO USE THE MODEL: The authors have developed a sustainability scan to use when making a diagnosis. This scan reveals: The major dilemmas and how people perceive the organization’s position in relation to these dilemmas; The corporate culture of an organization and their openness to the reconciliation of the major dilemmas; The competence of its leadership to reconcile these dilemmas. After the diagnosis, the organization can move on to reconciling the major dilemmas that lead to sustainable performance. To this end, the authors developed a dilemma reconciliation process. RESULTS To achieve sustainable success, organizations need to integrate the competing demands of their key stakeholders: operational processes, employees, clients, shareholders and society. By diagnosing and connecting different viewpoints and values, their research and consulting practice results in a better understanding of: The key challenges the organization faces with its various stakeholders and how to prioritize them; The extent to which leadership and management are capable of addressing the organizational dilemmas; The personal values of employees and their alignment with organizational values. These results help an organization define a corporate strategy in which crucial dilemmas are reconciled, and ensure that the company’s leadership is capable of executing the strategy sustainably. It does so while specifically addressing the company’s wealth-creating processes before the results show up in financial reports. It attempts to anticipate what the corporate financial performance will be some six months to three years in the future, as the financial effects of dilemma reconciliation are budgeted.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“The focus and need was shifting from simply understanding cultural differences and how to prevent embarrassments and resolve communication issues to how to leverage difference for competitive advantage, in a world where even local business may involve leading a diverse workforce.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“How are we to formulate a dilemma? First: describe the dilemma by using the words: ‘On the one hand… / and on the other hand…’ Second: describe positive elements of both sides of the dilemma (e.g. individual versus group; objective versus subjective; logic versus creativity; analytical versus intuitive; formal versus informal; rules versus exceptions; and so on). In general, most managers and people are afraid of dilemmas, which are more difficult to solve than problems with a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Dilemmas necessarily entail a respect and valuation of both sides of the issue and demand more creative and innovative solutions. This in turn requires a closer awareness of and attention to the values underlying different business models and the contexts in which they are used.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“The cultural databases that underpin this book have been extended to include not only more cases and more country data from more respondents but also a whole wealth of cultural measurements of competences, dilemmas and their reconciliations, servant leadership across cultures, innovation paradigms across cultures, and multicultural and remote team effectiveness.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Theories are developed to understand the world. Models are the testable summaries of theories, functioning in social science as instruments to improve organizations.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“THIS BOOK is about cultural differences and how they affect the process of doing business and managing.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“new ways of working”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“The book will also be of value to students of business and management to help prepare them for the new world of business, which is so different from only a few years ago.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010)”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“The ladder identifies people according to how they use social technologies, classified as creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Taken together, these groups make up the ecosystem that forms the groundswell. Each step on the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous steps.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“With the continuing growth and pervasion of the Internet, we have continued to add many other cultural measurement instruments and have developed associated ancillary databases and apps to disclose them.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“the world of business continued to move ever rapidly to the global village, accelerated by changing political, social, and economic forces enabled by air travel and communications technology.”
― Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

“Modern society increasingly sets paradoxical challenges: think globally and act locally, make a profit while being sustainable, maintain a convincing grand strategy and yet be responsive and agile, nurture innovation while maintaining tradition, encourage diversity as well as a coherent culture.”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models

“The authors of Groundswell suggest the POST approach for change, working with people (assess social activities of customers), objectives (decide what you want to accomplish), strategy (plan for how relationships with customers will change) and technology (decide which social technologies to use).”
― Fons Trompenaars, 10 Management Models