Prof. Geert Hofstede

Geert Hofstede (1928) is Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Since his retirement in 1993 he held visiting professorships in Hong Kong, Hawaii and Australia. He still serves as an Extra-Mural Fellow of the CentER for Economic Research of the University of Tilburg.

Geert Hofstede holds a Master's level degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Delft. He worked in different Dutch companies in roles varying from production worker to plant manager. After a part-time study he obtained a cum laude Doctorate in Social Psychology at the University of Groningen. From 1965 to 1971 he founded and managed the Personnel Research department of IBM Europe; he was involved in research in nearly all countries of Western Europe and the Middle East. He subsequently became a faculty member and researcher at IMD, Switzerland; INSEAD, France; EIASM, Belgium and IIASA, Austria. From 1980 to 1983 he returned to industry as a Director of Human Resources for Fasson Europe, Leiden. In 1980 he was also one of the founders of IRIC, the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation which moved with him to Maastricht and later to Tilburg; it was closed in 2004.

Through the publication in the USA of his scholarly book "Culture's Consequences" (1980, new edition 2001), he became a founder of comparative intercultural research; his ideas are used worldwide. His popular book "Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind" (1991, new edition 2005, co-authored with Gert Jan Hofstede) has so far appeared in 17 languages. Since the 1980s, Geert Hofstede has been the most cited Dutch author in the Social Science Citation Index. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management in the USA and a Doctor Honoris Causa of Nyenrode University in the Netherlands and of universities in Athens, Greece, Sofia, Bulgaria and Gothenburg, Sweden.

See also website http://www.geerthofstede.nl

Pat Jordan

Dr. Patrick W. Jordan is an international design and marketing consultant, author and professional speaker. His methods and ideas have influenced the design of many of the products that we find in our homes, cities and workplaces.

Pat is Owner and CEO of the Contemporary Trends Institute [CTI], an international trends and branding consultancy. Clients of CTI include multinational companies from many different industry sectors, including: aerospace, consumer goods, computers and IT, consumer electronics, medical, telecommunications, food and beverage, leisure and retail.

Pat is a former Vice-President of Symbian, where he was also head of design. Symbian is the world’s largest mobile-communications consortium, jointly owned by Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Psion, Ericsson, Sony and Panasonic. In addition, Symbian also licenses to Kenwood, Philips, Sanyo and Siemans. Prior to that he was a Human Factors consultant in the Applied Ergonomics team within Philips Design,where he also worked within the design studio of Domestic Appliences and Personal Care.

Dr. Jordan has been invited to lecture at conferences and seminars all over the world. He has over 100 publications in peer reviewed journals, books and conference proceedings. He has written or edited 6 books, all of which have reached # 1 in the Amazon.com category bestsellers lists. His books include Designing Pleasurable Products (Taylor and Francis 2000) which has become a standard design and marketing text within both industry and academia and the bestseller How to Make Brilliant Stuff that People Love and Make Big Money Out of It (Wylie 2002).

Pat has a visiting lectureship at London College of Fashion and Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design. He is also a guest lecturer at numerous universities in many different countries. Pat is on the advisory board of Delft University where he reviews and advises on the university’s design research agenda and is a non-executive director of Sense Worldwide a leading international trends bureau.

Pat is head of the Trends and Strategy section of the Industrial Designers Society of America. He is featured in Marquis Who’s Who in the World and The Dictionary of International Biography. He has also held the Nierenberg Chair at Carnegie-Mellon University, the most prestigious appointment in US design education.

Dr Jordan acts as a consultant to many of the world’s most successful brands and has advised the US and UK governments on public policy issues. He has won numerous professional awards for design and related activities.

Anne Kirah

Anne Kirah serves as a design anthropologist for MSN. Kirah leads field and laboratory research, including national and international projects, intended to influence current and future Microsoft product, software and service designs to improve humans’ interaction with technology.
Kirah also works with Microsoft partners and organizes the Microsoft Field Research Forum, an internal discussion and quality control group. Using primarily ethnography and participatory design methods, Kirah aims to improve the features, interfaces and the general ease of use for many Microsoft products by giving customers a voice during the product development cycle.

Kirah, who joined Microsoft in 1999, previously worked as a research associate for Boeing, the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer. She helped conceive quantitative research surveys for use onboard lengthy international flights and led a team of interviewers seeking input from passengers and crew to improve customer and employee satisfaction of aircraft design. In addition, Kirah has worked as a lecturer for several higher education institutions and state and local governments in the United States and in Scandinavia; a program evaluator in the public health sector; an expert witness in a variety of court cases; a primary investigator for many university research projects; and a translator for the Scandinavian University Press. Kirah has lived and worked extensively in Europe and Asia and is fluent in English, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. She also has some knowledge of French, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

Kirah has written award-winning newspaper articles in Japan, edited and written books about contemporary Norwegian society and won several research grants, fellowships and scholarships.

She holds an advanced graduate degree in social and cultural anthropology, as well as undergraduate degrees in social anthropology, the sociology of education and developmental psychology from the University of Oslo, Norway. She also holds a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Washington.