A strategic vision for Trompenaars Hampden-Turner Culture for Business for 2031: A story about strategy and design

This thesis explored the company Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT), its offerings, activities and the context it works in. THT is a company originally founded in 1989 as the Centre for International Business Studies. Trompenaars Hampden-Turner is a relatively small niche consulting company which is renowned in the area of Culture for Business. It is specialised in cultural dilemmas in the business context. Its employees work to improve the integration between people (values, attitudes) and organisations (structures, systems and processes). THT is a founder-centric organisation, and this poses certain risks and limitations which influence the growth and resilience of an organisation. For THT this means that in order to continue spreading their theories and practise consulting, the founder-centric configuration of the company needs to change. Therefore, the main research question was established as: How can a small founder-centric consultancy become less founder-centric and sustain growth in the coming ten years? In the first part, information was gathered to create a deeper understanding of the client, domain and the market. First, the company history, business model, products and competitors were analysed. To gather the information needed, various interviews were held with people working at THT. Secondly, literature was reviewed, looking into managing growth in organisations, founder-led companies and how organisations and consultancies are structured. These research activities resulted in a collection of insights which were used for the strategy creation. The insights yielded from the research were used to create a story which was written to design a future vision and communicate the vision. Storytelling was chosen to explore the benefits of this method, instead of sketching which is more common in industrial design. The created future vision called for a strategy in which THT’s portfolio consists of digital products such as an e-learning course. Using this future vision, a roadmap was created to strategize this pivot in company activity from consulting to content development. The roadmap is divided into three horizons. The goal of the first horizon is to focus on scaling down the current portfolio and focus on creating a base of e-learning courses. The goal of the second horizon is to expand the portfolio whilst learning service partners are attracted to partially outsource marketing and personal parts of the hybrid learning solutions. The goal of the third horizon is to be the best expert in the field when it comes to developing content. The proposed strategy for THT was supplemented with a design of the new organisational blueprint and some advice on the corporate communication including the name of the company. For the organisational blueprint, a circular model was chosen to easily scale with the organisation’s size or the range of the product portfolio. It was advised for the company name to make it refer to culture rather than the name of specific individuals. The strategy based on this take on a future vision for THT, combined with trends which were relevant to THT’s industry and knowledge on organisational design, resulted in a plan to become less founder-centric and sustain growth in the coming ten years.Strategic Product Desig