Research

First Project

My first research project dates back to 1997, when I was working in Bonn for the Christian Democrats, then the majority party in the German Bundestag. Helmut Kohl was Chancellor, Wolfgang Schäuble was Majority Leader. I reported directly to Dr. Schäuble on matters concerning Germany’s relations with the United States.

In this role I repeatedly observed how differently Germans and Americans communicated, presented, and persuaded — how they constructed and delivered their arguments.

1993-96 I had co‑led five-day intensive intercultural training seminars for Germans preparing for long-term assignments in the U.S., where persuasion was one of the core topics. But now, inside German politics, I was witnessing these differences at the highest level.

It was in this environment that I first applied the structured, evidence‑driven approach that would later evolve into UC’s research method, setting out to answer a single, deceptively simple question: When, where, and how do Germans and Americans respectively develop their fundamental approach to persuasion?

I began at the earliest stage of learning. In both countries, I interviewed kindergarten teachers. In the United States, children as young as four or five practice Show and Tell — standing at the front of the room, sharing an object, and telling its story to classmates.

I then spoke with teachers at middle and high schools, asking when students first give formal presentations and what they are taught. I requested lesson plans and materials. At the university level, I reached out to professors, posing the same questions, and drew on my own experience earning a master’s degree in Berlin for additional insight.

Next, I contacted learning and development departments at major global companies to understand how they trained employees in rhetoric, presentation skills, and selling. I asked for course outlines, training decks, and internal guidelines.

I also examined the commercial side of persuasion: I searched Amazon for the top-selling books on presenting, selling, and persuading — both in Germany and in the United States.

Persuasion also lives in the public sphere, so I looked at advertising in all its forms: television, radio, print, and online. Selling is persuasion in its purest form — a direct reflection of a national culture’s approach to convincing others.

Across these sources — education, corporate training, literature, and advertising — I gathered what I considered obvious, visible, and irrefutable evidence. I then sorted, grouped, and analyzed it, looking for patterns. I focused both on how each culture persuades and on the differences between them.

One striking example emerged:

Germans separate message from messenger: in professional settings, a presenter deliberately steps into the background so the message itself takes center stage. The belief is that arguments should speak for themselves.

Americans, by contrast, link message and messenger. The content, its form, and the presenter form a unity, with the messenger’s confidence, personality, and credibility central to persuasion.

The consequences of this difference are profound. For Americans, the German style can feel impersonal, abstract, even uninspiring. Distancing oneself from one’s message may read as risk-averse or disinterested. “If he himself is not clearly convinced by his own message, why should I be?”

Conversely, Germans often regard the American approach with ambivalence. They may find it motivating and engaging, yet also suspect that appeals to emotion betray a lack of rational substance: “There must be a reason why he is appealing to our emotions instead of to our reason.”

This was just one of several core differences I uncovered between the two cultures’ approaches to persuasion. The project taught me that meaningful cultural analysis demands time, effort, and a willingness to go deep and wide — to ask the right questions, gather the right evidence, analyze it carefully, and above all, recognize the patterns that explain the why behind the behavior.

Let’s remember that research is re-searching, constantly searching for the truth, in our case searching to understand culture and its influence on collaboration.