Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset

Charles Hampden-Turner · Fons Trompenaars

Apr 2021 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book addresses the twin goals of “Build Back Better” than before the pandemic and the Great Reset called for by the World Economic Forum. Can we use this crisis to re-vision capitalism as a life-preserving, livelihood-enriching phenomenon? All businesses now face the challenge of prospering while serving and saving lives. This should have been their mission all along! The pandemic is killing disproportionately those whom we have neglected. Deaths in Europe and the Americas are between ten and one hundred times more frequent than deaths in China and the region influenced by Chinese civilization for two thousand years. This is all despite the weeks of warning we had and wasted. Since Western governments must massively stimulate their economies in any case, spending trillions, this is a priceless opportunity to usher in certain kinds of world-saving businesses, and show out those kinds of business that wreck our eco-system. We have a priceless opportunity to create an economy that serves all its stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers and those who physically create wealth, not just those who trade in shares. This virus has sniffed out our selfishness, our toxic levels of individualism and self-indulgence. We should never waste a crisis on recriminations. It is an opportunity to reset our moral compass to re-discover that the true mission of business enterprise is to serve humanity with higher goals. Leadership must be dedicated to service, not self-aggrandizement.

About the author

Charles Hampden-Turner graduated from Trinity College Cambridge, and received his MBA and DBA from the Graduate School of Business of Harvard University. He was a recipient of the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment, among others. He is the author of 21 books, including Riding the Waves of Culture and Maps of the Mind (1981). The FT Online placed him among the world’s top 50 business thinkers in 2003, and he was the Goh Tjoei Kock Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2004-2005. Dr Hampden-Turner co-founded Trompenaars Hampden-Turner Consulting in 1983.

Fons Trompenaars is an organizational theorist, management consultant and best-selling author. He is known for his 7-dimensional model of national business cultures. His publications include Riding the Waves of Culture, and he is a recipient of a Professional Practice Award from the American Society of Training and Development. In 2011, HR Magazine voted him among the world’s top 20 international thinkers. He has also been elected to the Hall of Fame for Management Scholars, known as the Thinkers Fifty. Until recently, he had a column in the Dutch language edition of The Financial Times. He is Director of a course on Servant Leadership at the Free University of Amsterdam.