Errata: "fokker, a Clash of Culture?"

What role do cultural factors play in the survival of a company that faces existential problems, especially if these problems relate to co-operation between organisations with different cultures? We try to provide some answers by looking at the decline of the Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker. In 1996 this company went bankrupt and among the causes of this event cultural factors rank high, at least at first sight. We show that differences in national culture could have played a role in one of the defining moments in Fokker's existence: the failed take-over by the German aerospace giant Deutsche Aerospace (DASA). But we also show that an overambitious management was responsible for arriving at the situation in which there were no other options to survive besides a take-over by DASA. An increasing gap between the ambitions of the management to be one of the worlds prime aerospace companies and the limited resources of what was essentially a second-league player put Fokker in such a bad financial condition that it simply had to become an unbearable burden for DASA. So culture played a role in Fokker's decline, but its influence was most devastating long before the problems that brought the company down were recognised.