“Our German colleagues are risk averse. They see us Americans as taking unnecessary risk. We see them as doing far too much analysis. Germans think we’re cowboys. How can we beat the cliché that we are cowboys?”
It won’t be easy to get the Americans-are-cowboys cliché out of German thinking. And why is that?
In comparison to how Germans define risk and how they then make decisions our American approach is for them risky.
And the image deeply imbedded in their minds via Hollywood movies, popular literature, including their own author, Karl May, is of the American “shooting first, asking questions second.”
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