Dr Fons Trompenaars is recognised around the world for his work as a consultant, trainer, motivational speaker and author of various books on all subjects of culture and business. He is a world leader in understanding cultural difference, his seminal book Riding the Waves of Culture, Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business put culture in business on the map.
He has spent over 30 years helping Fortune500 leaders manage and solve their business and cultural dilemmas to increase global effectiveness and performance, particularly in the areas of globalisation, mergers and acquisition, HR, Managing Change, leadership development and digitalisation.
Fons Trompenaars has been ranked as one of the most influential management thinkers worldwide in the Thinkers50 three times in 2011, 2013 and 2015. The fact that business is getting more and more global makes it imperative to address the issue of managing cultural differences. Fons’ vision and expertise in this area, therefore, made him a logical contender for this list. He was inducted Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in November 2017 which salutes distinguished Management Thinkers and their contributions whose names and legacies are added to the ranks of those who have arrived before them.
Fons’ passion is in translating values into performance. He turns corporate leaders into top performers through developing their ability to identify and reconcile dilemmas. Outstanding leaders sense the dilemmas facing their industries and their organisations before their competitors and tend to find solutions quickly. The more formidable the dilemma, the greater the gain from resolving it first.
Fons began his career in the Personnel Division of the Royal Dutch Shell Group in 1981, where he looked at job classification and management development at the Shell Research Laboratories in nine different countries. He studied Economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and later earned a Ph.D. from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Listed regularly in the past decade as one of the world’s most influential, living, management thinkers, he has been awarded the International Professional Practice Area Research Award by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).
Fons co-founded THT (Trompenaars Hampden-Turner)an intercultural management firm in 1985, with Charles Hampden Turner and together they pioneered the Seven Dimensions of Culture and Dilemma Reconciliation philosophy into a powerful approach for reconciling cultural differences. With his growing team of consultants, Fons has translated this approach into innovative, practical and profitable results in all areas of international business for such companies as: 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, Pfizer, ABN AMRO, ING, PepsiCo, and Honeywell.
He is the author/co-author of 16 books, including the best seller and “Book of the Year” Riding the Waves of Culture, Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business. This book sold over 200,000 copies and was translated into 16 languages.
