About us

Company information

We are an independent UK-based business focused on one thing only:  providing online solutions for the development of intercultural competence, and being the best in the world at that. We’ve been pioneers in this field since 2002, and are now firmly established as the leading cultural assessment and learning platform, recognised by universities, major corporations, NGOs and renowned public institutions across the world.

The research base for Argonaut was set in the 1990s.  Argonaut’s first e-learning offer soon followed in 2002 with our first client, GlaxoSmithKline. The e-learning tools quickly became popular with clients in energy, law, education and industrial sectors. By today we have experience across almost all areas of economic and educational activity, including retail, not-for-profit, defence, telecoms, business consulting and many more.

Originally a collaboration between London-based international leadership consultants Coghill & Beery and Helsinki-based e-learning company Power of Learning, Argonaut became a company in its own right in 2007.

Argonaut Training Facilities Limited is headquartered in London (company number 06169511, VAT number 919251910) with operations in United Kingdom, Germany, France, Finland and a network of experts and contributors in six continents.

Argonaut is owned by its founders. Get to know the owners of Argonaut in these pages or get in touch personally.

Visit our Argonaut contacts page for address and contact information.

Team

We’re passionate about cross-culture and the impact that intercultural competence can have on business effectiveness, individual performance, personal happiness and global community.

In our team we have leadership, teambuilding and coaching knowledge, learning and development expertise, concept and research capability as well as e-learning and technical expertise.

The three founders Caroline Beery, Maria Jicheva and Richard Farkas were united by a common vision to create a tool that would be informative, interactive and relevant to both academics and practitioners. Caroline and Richard are still engaged in the company’s development and the current Argonaut team includes five nationalities.  Maria sadly passed away on 12^th June 2015, having left a long lasting impact on Argonaut. The wider Argonaut network of cultural correspondents and contributors consists of cross-culturalists with knowledge of intercultural issues which is both broad and deep.

Richard Farkas

Richard Farkas is a founder of Argonaut and today is responsible for the overall customer experience as well as business development in the CEO role. Richard personally manages some of the innovation projects and collaborates with subject matter experts on our concept development.

Manuel Heidegger

Manuel Heidegger is responsible for the business development and faciliates the Argonaut Train-the-Trainer programs at Argonaut. With a keen interest in e-learning development, virtual training and a passion for intercultural work, he has continued to feed in to the development of Argonaut over the past decade.

Caroline Beery

Caroline Beery is one of the originators of Argonaut and brings broad and deep intercultural expertise, having led an international management consulting firm providing online training, consulting and coaching for global companies. She has also taught university courses on managing in multicultural environments.

Sundae Schneider Bean

As an executive coach, trainer and intercultural specialist, Sundae partners with professionals and their families so that they can live well and work successfully across cultures, without losing their sense of purpose or adventure. Her clients include European multi-national organizations, international NGOs, and Fortune 500 companies, representing 40 countries across 6 continents.

Ivan Garbev

Ivan Garbev is responsible for visual design and user experience at Argonaut and CultureConnector. He is always looking for ways to make things more usable and intuitive for our customers.

Research

Argonaut’s theoretical framework is based on the cross-cultural conflict PhD research by Dr Carey Coghill, of Georgia State University, 1996 and her thesis on “Cross- Cultural Transition: A Case Study of Cultural Conflict Incidents”.

From this research were formed Argonaut’s twelve cultural dimensions in four areas: Time and Space, Hierarchy, Relationships and Dialogue. The early studies were conducted through 10 years of client focus-group research using a paper and pencil Cross-Cultural Analysis questionnaire, interviews with scores of business people living and working in a culture other than their own, and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural literature and research. The dimensions reflect consensus among academic interculturalists and as well practitioners working daily in cross-cultural environments.

Today Argonaut’s database of culture includes many thousands of datapoints based on a decade and a half of online assessment.

Expertise

Argonaut content comes from three main sources:

• specialist interculturalists, native of a particular culture;
• expatriate experience;
• cultural correspondents typically living within the culture who continuously research and regularly update Argonaut content.

Argonaut customers use our consulting expertise in the design, planning and rollout of major intercultural development programmes with a strong online component.   Our expertise is bolstered by the business backgrounds of our team and continually refreshed by input from our extended Argonaut network.

Our technology develops through the team’s in-house computer-assisted learning expertise, e-learning design specialisation, bespoke e-learning platform development, content management practices, as well security and other business process issues.

Vision, mission, values, practices

Argonaut vision

Learning about other cultures can be accelerated through online learning experiences. Web and mobile technologies enable intercultural training to be fast and cost effective, all the time bringing insights and openness to cultural difference.

Argonaut mission

We help people do business in new cultures with the confidence and success that they have in their own culture and to find the 1+1=3 magic of multicultural teams where cultural difference becomes a strength and an opportunity.

Values

• Fast – our customers have limited time and resource for training so we act fast to deliver easy-access learning solutions.
• Flexible – success across cultures relies on flexibility from both sides, just as we are flexible in our work with clients, emerging technologies and service to learners
• Open – we get better at what we do by being open to new people and ideas; we participate in communities of professionals who are building cultural understanding
• Ethical – we believe the business of cultural competence development improves the personal success of those whom it touches, favours the businesses who choose to invest in intercultural understanding and reduces the likelihood of international conflict