Calidad De La Empresa

Notes

1. D. Overkleeft & L. Groosman, former employees of Philips” External Relations, put more

than hundred speeches and interviews of Dekker together in “The Dekker perspective”

(1988).

2. It was promised to keep all interviews anonymous.

3. Philips Taiwan obtained the Deming award in 1992.

4. Despite these critical comments on the internal processes to implement quality as a central

topic, fourteen European multinationals including Philips initiated the establishment the

European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) which issued an annual quality

award like the Japanese Deming award and the American Baldwin award. The first

chairman of EFQM was C. Van der Klugt.

5. The divisions Medical systems, Defence, Large domestic appliances, Small domestic

appliances and Industrial Electro acoustic Systems were proclaimed stand alone/non core

activities. Those activities could be put up for sale, when they did not generate enough

profits. The light division was stand alone/core. It was turned into a separate firm, to prevent

that its profits would be used to cover losses for divisions who were in red figures.

6. Medical systems was withdrawn at the last moment from a merger with Picker, a daughter

of British General Electric Company. Later on chairman C. Boonstra decided not to sell

medical systems after reassessing its future market opportunities. Instead he bought

between 1998 en 2001 several companies in this branch like Marconi, ATL, ADAC and

Agilent.

Leadership style

87

7. During a stay at Harvard the vice president of Philips, A.E. Pannenborg, had met Prahalad

and had invited him as moderator for the international training programme for Philips

managers. Some Philips interviewees saw Prahalad as a gifted orator with well-performing

monologues, but others perceived him as a rhetor who was looking for the dialogue.

8. An invented crisis with a false press release and the use of benchmarks were also used in the

change operation of Unilever Netherlands during 1995-2000. Timmer and Unilever

Netherlands president Tex Gunning shared a similar Dionysian style. Prahalad was

consultant of Unilever too (Mirvis et al., 2003).

9. (1) delight customers, (2) value people, (3) deliver quality, (4) achieve premium return on

equity and (5) encourage entrepreneurial behaviour at all levels (Freedman, 1996).

10. Weeks before the town meeting were scheduled questions were posted in a special mailbox

which were overlooked by an external assessor, preventing the questions to be made public

or prematurely delivered to the BU-managers. The assessor gave the meeting an atmosphere

of importance and convinced the participants that it was not a theatrical play. It put

managers

...