Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars
ISBN: 0-471-49527-1
Cloth
400 pages

This is a book about culture. It explores the notion that foreign cultures are not arbitrarily or randomly different from each other: rather they are mirror images of each other's values, reversals of the order and sequence of looking and learning. Though the idea may be frightening at first, once grasped everything the foreign culture says and does falls into place in the trans-cultural world. Reconciling the differences and dilemmas should be an important part of creating wealth, as well as developing a humane, peaceful and just system of world governance. Human creativity and innovation are infinitely variable, but this variation can be seen as an endless series of responses to the same underlying dilemmas. This book asserts that the answer to managing cultural diversity may be to view the different dimensions and their mirror image reversals as alternative ways of coping with life's exigencies. The six dimensions of cultural diversity CH-T explores are:

1. Universalism v. Particularism
2. Individualism v. Communitarianism
3. Specificity v. Diffusion
4. Achieved Status v. Ascribed Status
5. Inner-direction v. Outer-direction
6. Sequential time v. Synchronous time.

The book shows how these dilemmas have been reconciled both by story-telling and by business cases which are resolved by organisational dilemmas to create wealth.