The last years have seen the idea of Managing Diversity (MD) travelling from the U.S. to Europe and gaining popularity with a growing number of European companies. In this paper, we look at the ways in which the 38 largest French and German companies have taken up elements of the MD discourse and integrated them into their annual reports and corporate web sites. We find that the firms in our sample do not present the coherent MD discourses one would expect in a U.S. setting, but a kind of patchwork, wich relates elements of an overall MD discourse to elements that are more closely related to the particular social and cultural contexts the firms are operating in. Building on an explorative comparative analysis we try to identify both pressures for the adoption of the U.S. model and forces that lead towards a stronger adaptation of the underlying ideals to local contexts. We develop different possibilities for the future development of MD practice in a European context and highlight a set of decisions companies have to answer when they want to put the transformational potential of MD into action.