Oscar van Weerdenburg

About Oscar van Weerdenburg

Oscar van Weerdenburg is an expert in the field of intercultural management, leadership development and international negotiations. Known for his sharp, colourful and humorous way of capturing cultural differences, he energizes his audience and engages participants to take a fresh look at their cross-cultural business challenges.

Drawing on 25 years of consulting to multinational corporations, Oscar brings to life numerous situations in which culture took people by surprise and forced them to reconsider their approach. What did successful global leaders do, and how did they seize upon cultural differences as an opportunity for new ideas, fresh perspectives and sustainable innovative solutions? Using a clear and constructive framework of intercultural readiness, Oscar invites his audience to reconsider their current cultural assumptions, to benchmark their intercultural competences and to get ready for their own and unique cross-border challenge.

In 1992, Oscar started his collaboration with Dr Fons Trompenaars, and founded Intercultural Business Improvement Ltd. in 1996. Since then, he has been involved in extensive research on intercultural competences and their relevance for internationally operating companies. His company developed the Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC), a questionnaire measuring global leadership competences. The quality of the IRC has been widely recognised by members of the academic and business community, and the IRC database by now is one of the world’s largest databases on intercultural competences.

In 2014, Oscar published Intercultural Readiness: Four competences for working across cultures (London: Palgrave); together with Dr Ursula Brinkmann. Based on a 15-year series of studies and involving 30,000 members of international organizations with roots on four continents, the book presents the core findings of how people and organizations can enhance their intercultural readiness, and how they can benefit from cultural diversity as a resource for new and innovative business solutions.

With over a 1000 workshops and presentations for more than 40 multinational organizations, including Daimler, British Airways, PricewaterhouseCoopers, ABN Amro, Statoil, Genpact, Vodafone, Rolls Royce, and Royal Dutch Shell, Oscar van Weerdenburg is one the most frequently invited speakers on cultural issues at international corporate conferences.

Since 2017, Oscar and his team have been the lead supplier for the intercultural learning and development programs for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, providing face-to-face, online and blended learning opportunities to professionals at the ministry in The Hague and for culturally diverse teams at Dutch embassies world-wide. One of his recent assignments has been a coaching project for a culturally diverse team of a German multinational.