Tagged as: Trompenaars
Jul 21, 2013 Taking your values overseas
Your home market is mature and saturated. Too many competitors, not enough bandwidth to diversify, a solid customer base but growth rates are not exactly keeping the exchanges buzzing. You decide to branch out overseas. Everyone else is in the BRICs, the Gulf, APAC, Africa, why shouldn’t you be? But your business m
Sep 01, 2012 Exploring your organisation’s culture – who are you?
There’s a great onboarding activity in which new recruits are asked to explore their recently joined organisation as if they were anthropologists looking for artefacts, rituals and beliefs. The new joins scatter around the company – complete with pith helmets in some cases – to observe and interview, collec
Jul 20, 2012 Organisational Cultures in Multinationals – Same Same?
When we look at organisational cultures, we usually identify the influences as coming from the surrounding environment, the size and maturity of the organisation, the ownership, the organisation’s approach to technology, and the sector and markets it operates in. And, typically, an organisation’s culture is set i
Jul 06, 2012 Building a Global Team’s Identity – From WIIFM To WIIFU
The traditional metaphor likens American business teams to baseball teams and Japanese ones to tug of war sides. In the former, individuals can still shine or disappoint however well the team does. In the latter, it’s hard to discern individual input – the team succeeds or fails as a whole. So far so good, but ti
Jun 24, 2012 Shall We Dance or You Wanna Race?
What does time look like to you? Does it stretch straight ahead into the distance, measurable yet infinite? Or does it loop and circle around like a bee? Is time money and the schedule king? Or are relationships more important and time rubbery like a Dalí clock?
Of all the cultural dimensions the element of time is the one that often pro
May 23, 2012 Organisational Cultures – Beyond The Individual
Reviewing his own research, the management guru Fons Trompenaars once concluded:
“However objective and uniform we try to make organisations, they do not have the same meaning for individuals from different cultures…Likewise the meaning that people give to the organisation, their concept of its structu
