Views on Management: Rijnland vs. Anglo-American

On invitation of Bram, who is a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma, I participated in a meeting with members of a Dutch network of quality managers (Nederlands Netwerk van Kwaliteitsmanagers – NNK). The goal of this NNK network and someone that brings Lean Six Sigma into practice is, as you might have guessed: quality improvement.
As I am a Business Process Management consultant at Approach, which of course has a lot to do with (process) quality improvement, I gladly accepted this invitation. Topic of the evening was the difference between two views (Rijnlands vs. Anglo-American) on quality management. Rijnlands being a management paradigm from the Netherlands and Germany, Anglo American as a management culture from USA and UK.

Anyway, “what is the relationship between this story and process management & quality improvement?”, you might think?
Well, process improvement is a co creation between workers / craftsman. Bosses and technostructure (Mintberg, “Structures In Fives”) have to let workers and craftsman do their job and stimulate process improvement, and trust their people to come up with solutions. Top down coordination efforts are often a waste of time for workers and managers unless these actions consist of sharing a vision, setting overall goals and constraints.

BPM consultants, like me, have to go see what happens at the workplace (Gemba). We can help but the actual changes, ideas etc. have to emerge bottom up. This way you have support from the people that do the job and higher acceptance of changing processes more often. Let’s say: Meet in the middle.

Almost all attendees came from international companies from the production industries (steel, pharmaceutics), retail and banking, with branches in the Netherlands, Dutch companies that merged with American or English companies, or vice versa. A few people came from government agencies (ministry of defense) and large education institutes. These people all have a lot of experience working with both management paradigms, because of mergers in the last decades.
As soon as it became clear that the lecturer/ speaker could not arrive we decided to form groups to discuss the differences and each team presented an outcome.

The other teams came up with several contrasting approaches within the mentioned views. At the end it turned out that ‘our’ group, that consisted of the most diverse people you could ever imagine, came up with all the contrasts listed and more. Actually our summary was the summary of the evening’s content. Gave me some confirming thoughts on how important it is to have multi-discipline teams and diversity of people within a team.

The list:

The above list reveals quite a lot of contrasts between the two management views/ paradigms. As we talked about these differences a bit more plenary, we recognized a trend of merging more ‘positive perceived elements’ from both views, in time. Overall message was: take the positive from both views, don’t emphasize on the differences.

Of course I looked at some surveys and articles of scientists about this topics to confront my own thoughts, afterwards. Prof. Jaap Peters (see website) for instance, author of, amongst others, ‘de Intensieve Menshouderij’ distinguishes Rijnlands and Neo Liberalism and does emphasize on the different approaches:

Of course Jaap Peters talks about neo liberalism; not Anglo-American. He does not tell they are the same. But when you consider how the listed items of neo-liberalism corresponds with Anglo-American, and consider that managers in Europe were trained / educated according to American and English views on management he implicitly points in that direction.

Instead Prof. Fons Trompenaars & Peter Woolliams try to link cultural values to bottom line business performance: In this article they explain that there is a way to reconcile cultural differences.
I think there’s a relationship with the studies of Geert Hofstede too, of whom I blogged before and some of the things Jim Collins (Good to Great & Build to Last) wrote about level 5 leadership and great companies. (Level 5 leaders are by definition resolute, loving, vigorous, disciplined, listening very carefully, confronting and have huge faith in their people and the chosen strategy. People within great companies are incredibly disciplined, full of faith, open and self-motivated)