Riding the Waves of Innovation: Harness the Power of Global Culture to Drive Creativity and Growth - Hardcover

by Fons Trompenaars (Author), Charles Hampden-Turner (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

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.

Author Biography

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.