Proposed themes

• The art of integrating cross-frontier mergers and acquisitions
• The implications of globalization
• Corporate vision and values

Dr Fons Trompenaars

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

Fons entered the Royal Dutch Shell Group in 1981 and moved into the Personnel Division for Shell in Rotterdam. From 1985, he worked in job classification and management development at the Shell Research Laboratories in Amsterdam. In 1989 he 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. In 2003, a compilation of his bi-weekly articles in a Dutch financial newspaper was released under the title Did the Pedestrian Die (Capstone/Wiley). In December of 2003, Business Across Cultures was released, as the first book in a new series called Culture for Business.