Riding the Waves of Culture
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner · 1993
Riding the Waves of Culture (1993) is a book by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner on Cross-Cultural Communication. Drawing on decades of surveys with managers worldwide, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner map seven dimensions on which cultures differ, and argue the winning move is reconciling opposites, not choosing between them.
The field guide that turns "they just do business differently over there" into seven measurable dimensions you can actually manage, and then shows you how to reconcile them instead of picking a side.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Riding the Waves of Culture pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Culture is not a set of quaint customs but a shared way of solving problems and resolving dilemmas. What looks like rudeness abroad is usually a different, equally coherent answer to a universal human question.
- The **universalism vs particularism** dimension asks whether rules or relationships come first. Trompenaars' famous car-accident dilemma, do you lie to protect a speeding friend?, splits Swiss and North American managers from Venezuelan and Korean ones almost cleanly.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- Culture Is How a Group Solves Its Problems
- The Three Layers of the Onion
- Universalism versus Particularism: Rules or Relationships
- Individualism versus Communitarianism
- Neutral versus Affective: How Much Feeling Do We Show?
- Specific versus Diffuse: How Far Does the Relationship Reach?
- Achievement versus Ascription: How Status Is Accorded
- Time and Nature: Sequential, Synchronic, Inner- and Outer-Directed
- Corporate Cultures and the Art of Reconciliation
Finish Riding the Waves of Culture tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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