Geert Hofstede was born in a peaceful country, but his teenage years saw the second World War rage across Europe. He started working as an engineer during turbulent years of rebuilding, and soon became a personnel manager. Fascinated by the human in the system, he did a PhD in organizational behaviour.
This landed him a job with the personnel research department of IBM international. In the late sixties he began analysing the data from a company wide personnel survey exercise. That period of pioneering discovery yielded the book Culture’s Consequences.
Geert’s ideas about dimensions of culture were so outrageous that seventeen publishers refused the manuscript before a visionary boss at Sage accepted it. the book appeared in 1980. The rest is history.
The model has undergone various major extensions since the first study. It now counts six dimensions instead of the original four. They are described in the 2010 popular edition Cultures & Organizations, Software of the mind By Geert, his son Gert Jan and culturologist Michael Minkov.
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