Background

Dr. Trompenaars studied economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and earned a PhD from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He experienced cultural differences firsthand at home, where he grew up speaking both French and Dutch, and later when working with the Royal Dutch Shell Group in nine countries.

Dr, Trompenaars joined Royal Dutch Shell in 1981 in the personnel division in Rotterdam. Beginning in 1985, he worked in job classification and management development at the Shell Research Laboratories in Amsterdam. In 1989, Dr. Trompenaars became managing director of the Centre for International Business Studies, a consulting and training organization for international management. Since October 1998, the firm has used the name Trompenaars Hampden-Turner.

Dr. Trompenaars has worked as a consultant for 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, Pfizer, ABN, AMRO, ING, PepsiCo, and Honeywell.

Dr. Trompenaars's book Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business (Nicholoa Brealey, 1993) has sold over 120,000 copies and been translated into French, German, Dutch, Korean, Danish, Turkish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Portuguese. In 1994, the translation of Riding the Waves of Culture was awarded "Book of the Year" by the Order of Experts and Consultants on Organization, a Dutch management organization. A revised second edition, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business, co-authored with C.M. Hampden-Turner, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1998.

Dr. Trompenaars also coauthored, with C.M. Hampden-Turner, Seven Cultures of Capitalism (Doubleday, 1993), Building Cross-Cultural Competence (Yale University Press, 2000), and 21 Leaders for the 21st Century (McGraw-Hill, 2001). His book Did the Pedestrian Die? (Capstone, 2003) is a compilation of his bi-weekly articles in the Dutch financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad.

In 1991, Dr. Trompenaars won the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) International Professional Practice Area Research Award. In 1999, he was mentioned as one of the top five management consultants, along with Michael Porter, Tom Peters, and Edward de Bono, in a leading business magazine.