Nine visions of capitalism by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars
7 September 2015 by Catherine Holdsworth in Book publishing, Business and finance, Nine visions of capitalism
Capitalism in crisis: top culture management gurus map the route to a fairer global economy
Capitalism has been in a state of crisis for nearly a hundred years. The effects of the stock market crash of 1929 were felt well into the 1950s. The turbulence in international currency markets in the late 1960s, which sparked worldwide street protests in 1968, was unresolved until the mid-1980s. And the avalanche of financial crises that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 is still falling on businesses, consumers and communities around the world. In the face of such evidence it would be easy to think that capitalism is a doomed system.
However in Nine visions of capitalism: unlocking the meanings of wealth creation authors Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars suggest otherwise. Capitalism does have a future, they say, but only if the standard Anglo-American model of capitalism is radically transformed. As the authors point out, creating wealth is much more than simply making money. They say, “A community is only better off when it creates wealth through the transformation of money into products and services and the transformation of these back into money via revenue received.” The current model of capitalism has led to a situation where the net worth of the world’s top 10 billionaires stands at over $500 billion, enough to end world poverty instantly twice over. But the global economy is not richer for the presence of billionaires if the money in their pockets has simply been transferred from those of other people.
So how can this failing model be fixed? Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars argue that accommodating diversity is a pre-requisite for the reinvention of wealth creation. China’s spectacular growth, the dynamism and flexibility of the Mittelstand of German-speaking economies, Singapore’s hybridization of East and West, the world’s vibrant immigrant communities and the drive for renewable energy offer different aspects of an authoritative and challenging blueprint for the future of capitalism. Finally, the authors draw on examples of innovation in capitalism such as the Conscious Capitalism movement in the US, the Cambridge Phenomenon in the UK and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, which has members from Mongolia to Patagonia as well as the US and UK, to demonstrate what can be done to reinvigorate tired models, and provide a realistic, practical and powerful transformation agenda for the global economy.
About the authors
Management philosopher Charles Hampden-Turner was Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. The creator of Dilemma Theory and co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner Group in Amsterdam, he was Goh Tjoei Kok Distinguished Visiting Professor to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2002–3 and Hutchinson Visiting Scholar to China in 2004. He is a past winner of the Douglas Mc Gregor Memorial Award and has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Fons Trompenaars is an organizational theorist, management consultant and bestselling author known globally for the development of the Trompenaars’ model of national culture differences. He was awarded the International Professional Practice Area Research Award by the American Society for Training and Development and Business magazine ranked him as one of the world’s top five management consultants. In 2013 he was ranked in the Thinkers50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers. He is the author or co-author of numerous books including Riding the Waves of Culture and 100+ Management Models.
