Overview
Main description
The authors of the international bestseller
Riding the Waves of Culture broaden their
focus to help you employ the diversity in your
organization to foster innovation.
Companies that successfully harness employees’
creativity and convert it to business
innovation are leading the charge today.
While this isn’t a brand-new concept, no one
has explained how connections between people
initially remote from each other generate
innovation—until now. Riding the Waves of
Innovation fills the void.
The key is for leaders and managers like you
to carefully address and make the most of
the three entities that are most vital to your
business’s approach to driving innovation
throughout your global culture:
- The individuals who compose your team.
Are you encouraging them to champion
innovation and bring it to fruition? You’ll
learn how such methodologies as the Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator and Kolb’s Learning
Style Inventory can be developed to
avoid stereotyping your people and build
effective teams.
- Your teams.
Are you encouraging them to
innovate?
Fons Trompenaars and Charles
Hampden-Turner teach you to define the
role best suited for each team member; reconcile
any differences between, or amongst,
them; and ensure that their work together is
optimized.
- Your organization.
Does it maintain a global
culture of innovation? The authors’ in-depth
research, playfully illustrated via inventive
graphs and business-world anecdotes, will
teach you to ensure that adaptability, shared
goals and values, reliability, and commitment
are all universally acknowledged and
embraced aspects of your business’s corporate
culture.
Author comments
Fons Trompenaars is a renowned expert
on international management and his book,
Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding
Cultural Diversity in Business, has sold more
than a quarter of a million copies in English
and has been translated into nineteen languages.
His most recent book is Servant-
Leadership Across Cultures. Trompenaars has
served as head of Trompenaars Hampden-
Turner, a consulting and training organization
for international management since 1989.
Charles Hampden-Turner is with Trompenaars
Hampden-Turner in Amsterdam. Recognized
as a key business thinker, he has
worked as a consultant for Shell, BP, Digital
Equipment, the BBC, Nissan, and many other
companies. Until recently, he taught at Cambridge
University.
Back cover copy
Three Pillars of the Highly
Innovative Global Organization
Innovation is more than just a buzzword. It’s what makes the difference between mere
business as usual and decisions that build and sustain business. In Riding the Waves of
Innovation, bestselling business experts Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner offer invaluable approaches for optimizing your organization’s capacity for innovation
within today’s global culture. You’ll learn how to:
- Identify and remove common obstacles to innovation
- Build the most effective teams
- Use playfulness and humor to jump-start creativity
- Keep things in check with institutionalized verification
- Establish a road map for launching new products
- Ensure your marketing and R&D departments
are speaking the same language
Complete with lessons learned from proven organizational innovators like Jack Welch,
the Cassini-Huygens space mission team, Michael Dell, and others, Riding the Waves of
Innovation empowers you to steer your company through the whirlwind of today’s turbulent
economy—and the uncertainty of tomorrow.
