Michael Frese, a business psychologist at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, puts the rule this way: Fehler sollte man nicht bestrafen, Übertretungen hingegen schon. Mistakes should not be punished, but transgressions should. In a study published in 2005 with three colleagues, he found that a culture of managing errors was linked to better company performance. The finding held in a second study, using data on changes in profitability from 47 German organizations. A 2018 article in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse sums up the research on error culture in one sentence: Theorie und Praxis liegen weit auseinander. Theory and practice lie far apart.