Germany – Page 28 – understand-culture

Balance customer and supplier

Augenhöhe. Literally eye-level. To be at eye-level with each other. Germans reject any form, even the slightest indication, of a one-sided customer-supplier relationship. One-sided in the sense of imbalance, a working relationship in which the one is master, the other slave.

For Germans, implicit in any business relationship is a transaction, an exchange, a trade. A problem is solved. A need is satisfied. A lack of expertise in a particular area, on a specific question, is provided from the outside. Manufacturing needs better technology. The company needs advice concerning tax law. Another company needs help with marketing, logistics, personnel, product packaging, research and development.

The list of possible business transactions is infinite. People, teams, companies collaborate, work together, because one has something the other needs, and will exchange it for something of value.

Germans are very sensitive to maintaining balance in any form of collaboration. The German customer wants in a supplier, service provider or consultant: someone who insists on working with them at eye-level, who is self-confident, knows her own worth, and rejects any working relationship which can lead to an imbalance.

The German customers want the best possible work results, input, support from suppliers, service providers, and consultants. They do not want those who react immediately to each and every desire, idea, or spontaneous thought they might have, as if the client had issued a purchase order.

Often the customer is not in a position to recognize what is best for them. And every customer is, in turn, a supplier, service provider or consultant to another company in another business relationship. That’s what business means. Today customer, tomorrow supplier.

The Germans would far more prefer to consult than to serve. Consulting is knowledge- / expertise-based. To give advice. Two parties standing at eye-level to each other. Balance. Listen, discuss, decide, act. The one side pays for it. Of course. But for the Germans, the customer is never king. And the supplier, service provider, consultant is never slave.

No Agreement

Germans seldom reach agreement when the demands of the conflict parties are in stark opposition to each other and the negotiations have become confrontational. An agreement is made when both parties take a cooperative approach. One-sided demands work against that.

If one party to the conflict is clearly stronger than the other and attempts to take advantage of the weaker party, the German conflict resolution approach will try to compensate for the imbalance.

Etwas vom Tisch fegen. Literally to brush something off of the table; to ignore something; to treat someone or something as unimportant, irrelevant; to push to the side; to conceal.

Mitdenken

Mitdenken – literally mit with + denken thinking. With-thinking or thinking with. A very German word. There is hardly a German who has not heard this word repeatedly, from their parents, in school, from their driving instructor, or their boss. They all stress, expect, demand Mitdenken. But what does Mitdenken mean?

Duden, one of Germany’s most prestigious dictionaries, offers a brief but complex definition: „etwas denkend bei einer Tätigkeit nachvollziehen.” Literally: “something thinking during a task comprehending.”

Grammatically this formulation does not work in English. Its meaning, however, is: while you are performing a task, a job, an activity, be aware of how and why you are doing it, in the sense that you are recapitulating or reproducing in your mind how and why the task should be done in a certain way.

Duden also states: “nicht gedankenlos, sondern mit Überlegung vorgehen.“ This is easier to understand. Literally: “not thoughtless, but with Überlegung (consideration, reflection, thought, observation, deliberation) proceed.” In other words, think through carefully what you do while you are doing it.

A German online dictionary states: “think clearly about what is to be done; for this work we need someone, who can think-with; students should learn to think-with; we need young people who can think-with.”

Mitdenken is also defined as „etwas mit anderen Gedanken zusammen denken” – literally: “something with other thoughts combined think.” Meaning: to think about something while combining other thoughts with it.

Not Your Bitch

In 2009, author Neil Gaiman, who was born in England but has lived in the US since 1992, wrote a blogpost titled Entitlement Issues. In it he discusses a letter he received from a fan of the author George R R Martin, who complained that it seemed like Martin wasn’t spending enough time working on his latest novel.

Gaiman comments on how readers tend to think that, once they spend money on one of the books in a series, the author no longer has the right to do anything other than write the next one.

At one point he writes “you’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would hand over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.”

The English-American author also attempts to convince readers that authors are not obligated to fulfill their readers’ every wish, saying, “George R R Martin is not your bitch.”

“No!” to top-down

Although Germans are known to follow written laws and directives, they reject almost instinctively any and all top-down decisions, directives or commands where management has not involved them in their formulation.

Especially when it involves the details of their daily work, Germans are very sensitive to outside influences which limit their freedom of decision making and action. Germans at all levels reject top-down decisions, based on hierarchical authority and not on persuasive arguments.

Autonomy !

Autonomie. Autonomy. Greek autonomía, independent, free, self-determining; acting based on free will.

Autonomy has a negative connotation in the German culture. Those who demand their autonomy are often seen as being uncooperative, as wanting to be totally free, not connected, not tied to or related to others.

To be autonomous in Germany sounds like not being connected to the whole, not belonging, rejecting it. The term autonomy is often used in a political context. Alarm bells go off in the German head when groups demand more autonomy. A well-known radical group on the left refers to themselves as the Autonomen.

On the other hand, institutions such as universities often seek more autonomy from state regulation. In that sense autonomy stands for independence, self-reliance, and transparency. There is a very fine line in the German culture between autonomy and independence.

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling

Not many people know of the great friendship between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, at their time the world’s greatest boxers.

June 19, 1936. In famed Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The American Joe Louis versus the German Max Schmeling. Their first of two fights. Louis undefeated 24-0 and never knocked down, hits the canvas in the twelfth round. The fight is over.

Round 12 starts at 27:27. At 29:27 Louis is defenseless. He goes down. The referee ends the fight. Schmeling rushes over to help Joe Louis. Schmeling stays with Louis all the way over to his corner of the ring. Schmeling’s people have to literally pull him away from Joe Louis.

Among the attendees of the fight was Langston Hughes, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a noted literary figure. Hughes described the national reaction to Louis’ defeat in these terms:

“I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

Poet and author Maya Angelou, recounted her recollection. A young Angelou had listened to the fight over the radio in her uncle’s country store in rural Arkansas. While Louis was on the ropes,

“My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another black man hanging on a tree …. this might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes.”

June 22, 1938 – two years from the day Louis had won the world heavyweight title – the fighters meet once again in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in New York City.

Louis defeats Schmeling in the very first round. Knowing what a true and loyal friend Schmeling was to become to Joe Louis at the end of Louis’ life, it breaks your heart to see how helpless Max Schmeling was in the final seconds of this first round.

After retiring from the ring, Schmeling purchased a Coca- Cola bottling and distribution franchise in Hamburg in 1948, the first in Germany after World War II.

Schmeling reached out and developed a friendship with Louis after their boxing careers ended and provided financial assistance to his former foe in the 1950s. He also paid for part of the funeral arrangements when Louis died in 1981. Max Schmeling was one of the pallbearers.

“It wasn’t until after World War II that I saw him again,” Louis said in his autobiography. “We hugged each other and we’re real friendly and kept in touch by phone.”

The battles between Louis, a black man, and Schmeling came to symbolize for some the coming struggle between Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allies in World War II. Although Hitler had praised Schmeling after the first fight, Schmeling was not an admirer of the German leader and refused to join the Nazi party.

Schmeling, who served as a German paratrooper in World War II, later received an award from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation for risking his life to hide two Jewish brothers during the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked and destroyed by Nazis.

The boys, Henri and Werner Lewin, made their way to the U.S., where Henri became a hotel owner. Schmeling kept his act of courage secret. Henri Lewin revealed it at a dinner honoring the former champion in 1989:

“He risked his life for us. Our lives weren’t worth a penny,” Lewin said in a 2002 interview with the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. “I said, ‘If this is a Nazi, he’s a good Nazi. But I want you to know one thing: I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it wasn’t for this Nazi.'”

Max Schmeling never joined the Nazi Party.

August 9, 1973. Legendary boxers and great friends, Max Schmeling and Joe Louis meet in New York, as Schmeling arrives for visit.

This History Channel documentary is well worth watching.

Auftrag

Auftrag. A command, instruction, order, to complete a task, job, assignment; to order a product or service; an obligation, a duty. An Auftrag is given by a manager or a customer. The Auftrag indicates that someone will do something for another. An Auftrag can be rejected. They can be legally binding. An employee can assign herself an Aufgabe, but not an Auftrag.

Aufträge (plural of Auftrag) are foundational to any economy. Whether it is involves one colleague answering the email of another or one company building a production site for another, Aufträge are the lifeblood of commercial activitiy.

An Auftrag is at its core a request from a customer. Taking on the Auftrag signals that one will complete it to the best of their ability. The details are set in a purchase order or in a contract.

German companies report time and again that their Auftragsbücher, order books, are full, but that they cannot fulfill all of them due to a shortage of trained personnel, often technicians and engineers. Taking on an Auftrag is no guarantee that one can complete it.

This also means a certain degree of risk for the Auftraggeber (Auftrag giver), the customer, that the supplier will not supply the end product on the agreed upon date, or at the expected level of quality. In many ways it is also unimportant who completes the task. In contrast to an Aufgabe, an Auftrag is impersonal, business-like, unemotional. The relationship is all about the execution of the job. No more, no less.

A self-identification with the task is secondary. Only the final results count. Is the Auftrag completed, rejected or not doable, then it automatically no longer exists.

Erbfeindschaft

The Germans have very low tolerance for conflict resolutions which declare clear winners and losers. Do Germans do their best to avoid open confrontation because the one or the other side wants to avoid being the loser, or because their sense of humility forbids them from being the declared winner?

A look into recent history might help us to understand why Germans avoid zero-sum mentality, preferring instead win-win situations.

The so-called German-French Erbfeindschaft – loosely translated as traditional or hereditary enmity or hostility – was a term used to define the wars between the two peoples going back to King Louis the XIV up until and including the Second World War.

The Germans won the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The annexation of Elsass-Lothringen by Germany led to French desire for revenge.

The French are then on the winning side of the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles punishes Germany very harshly, making a lasting peace almost impossible. The Germans see it as political and military humiliation, which the National Socialists use to their advantage in the 1930s.

Then the Second World War. The Germans defeat and occupy France. But the Germans lose that war. But this time both sides have learned their lesson. They decide to integrate economically in order to end once and for all the so-called Erbfeindschaft. They choose cooperation over confrontation.

The Germans believe that a conflict is not resolved when one side loses and the other wins. A conflict is resolved when both sides accept the resolution.

Look at my work

German non-governmental organizations – NGOs – are confronted by the dilemma that they need to function well as organizations, but do not want to give their members the impression that they work for an organization.

Internal power struggles are poisonous for small, low-budget organizations. Members need to know that they are serving a higher purpose and not an organizational structure, much less specific people within that structure.

For Germans, their work, what they accomplish day in and day out, is very much a part of their personal identity. On the one side this makes it difficult for them to maintain distance from their work.

On the other, however, it enables them to work very conscientiously and independently. The German logic is: “Do you want to understand who I am? Look at my work.“