an English girl introduced to him by a friend of his family Alain Meiar, where he experienced cultural shock. He was struck by the cultural differences that he noticed between England and the Netherlands, two very close European countries. These early experiences helped translate into a lifelong career in cross-cultural research. A second important period in his life was working in industry between 1955 and 1965, when he held professional and managerial jobs in three different Dutch industrial companies. By experiencing management, he had a chance to see the organization from the bottom up working as a mechanic. This training and background as an engineer shaped his research and his approach to social situations. He claims that his description of social situations appeals to a number of people: "I still have the mind of an engineer to the extent that I try to be specific...and be clear about what I am saying". That was important in his development of quantifying cultures on different dimensions. IBM research At IBM International, Hofstede started working as a management trainer and manager of personnel research, and founded and managed the Personnel Research Department. This was his transition from the field of engineering and into psychology. In this role, he played an active role in the introduction and application of employee opinion surveys in over 70 national subsidiaries of IBM around the world. He traveled across Europe and the Middle East to interview people and conduct surveys regarding people's behavior in large organizations and how they collaborated. He collected large amounts of data, but the pressures of his daily job made him unable to conduct a significant amount of research. When he took a two-year sabbatical from IBM in 1971, he delved deeper into the data he had collected from his job and discovered that there were significant differences between cultures in other organizations but got the same ranking of answers by country. At the time, the results of the IBM's surveys, with over 100,000 questionnaires, were one of the largest cross-national databases in existence. He became a visiting lecturer at IMEDE (now the International Institute for Management Development) in Lausanne, Switzerland. At IMEDE, he administered a selection of IBM questionnaire items to his course participants, who were international managers from over 30 countries and from a variety of different private and public organizations unrelated to IBM. Hofstede found that the same results that he