Page 299 - Cultures and Organizations

268 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

planned population control at all, the population of Nigeria grew by 169
percent from 55 million to 148 million, an average of 2.9 percent a year. 76
China’s rulers have to cope with the domestic political consequences
of the country’s economic opening toward the rest of the world. Turning
around a nation of 1.3 billion people without falling into despotism, anar-
chy, or fatal destruction of the environment is immensely more diffi cult
than modernizing an island with 5 million inhabitants as with Singapore.
In a 1988 article that analyzed the implications of the Chinese Value Sur-
vey, at a time when China was still exceedingly poor, Geert interpreted
China’s top score on what he later called LTO as a likelihood that “the
People’s Republic will follow the success of the Five Dragons—albeit at
some distance—and eventually become the sixth—and most powerful—
dragon of them all.” History has proved this prophecy correct. 77
The opposite example in the 1980s was the Soviet Union and its sphere

of political influence, which stifled initiative in places where—according to
their LTO-WVS scores—the mental software for development was pres-
ent. The fast economic growth in a number of Eastern European countries
since the end of the Soviet era has demonstrated this.
The development of East Asia was strongly guided by a desire to learn
from others. Japan has actively studied European (in particular, Dutch)
science and technology since the seventeenth century. Western fads and
fashions are popular in East Asia even where governments don’t like them.
Likewise, Eastern European countries in spite of communism have always
taken the West as a model.
This desire to learn from others is not necessarily present in countries
scoring low on the LTO-WVS index. National pride is a component of
short-term orientation, and too much national pride is a recipe for eco-
nomic disaster. In the United States it contributed to the decision to start

the Iraq war with a cost of a trillion dollars. It supports a lack of interest
in and understanding of other countries, and it played a major role in the
2008 fi nancial crisis. 78
In Chapter 9 we will compare business goals and corporate governance
across major economic powers and will show that the dominant concern of
U.S. business leaders for short-term growth and greed without continuity
and responsibility was already visible in an international comparison in
the 1990s.