TROMPENAERS Fons

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Fons Trompenaars studied Economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and later earned a Ph.D. from Wharton School, of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on differences in conceptions of organisational structure in various cultures.

He experienced cultural differences firsthand at home, where he grew up speaking both French and Dutch, and then later at work, with the Royal Dutch Shell Group in nine countries.

In 1989 Fons became Managing Director of the Centre for International Business Studies (C.I.B.S. B.V.), a consulting and training organisation for international management; which now trades as Trompenaars Hampden-Turner.

He has worked as a consultant for such companies as: Shell, BP, Philips, IBM, Heineken, Applied Materials, AMD, VNU, TRW, Mars, Motorola, General Motors, Dow Chemical, CSM, Telfort, Wolters Kluwer, Gerling NCM, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, and Honeywell.

Fons Trompenaars wrote Riding the Waves of Culture, Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business, published by Nicholas Brealey (1993). This book has sold over 120,000 copies and has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Korean, Danish, Turkish, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish and Portuguese.

He is also co-author of Seven Cultures of Capitalism (Doubleday, 1993), Building Cross-Cultural Competence (John Wiley, 2000) and 21 Leaders for the 21st Century (John Wiley and McGraw Hill, 2001) with Charles Hampden-Turner.

Subject areas include:

- integrating cross-frontier mergers and acquisitions
- the implications of globalisation:
       corporate vision and values
 - building cross-cultural competence