United States – Page 19 – understand-culture

Disaggregate

Disaggregate: to separate into component parts; to break up or apart. Americans not only aggregate, they also disaggregate.

A manager has a spontaneous idea, calls a meeting with more than a handful of experts to discuss it, then just as quickly disbands it noting that she and they should continue thinking about it. A corporate-internal project, generously funded at first, but which does not produce the initial results expected, has the “plugged pulled” on it quickly.

When low earnings over three straight quarters has investors grumbling, executive management reacts quickly with corrective action: close plants, layoff workers, hire a consulting firm to recommend a cost-cutting program.

At least until the end of the Second World War, the United States maintained a modest standing army, forcing it during war to ‘ramp up’ as rapidly as possible, only to then after the war demobilize just as rapidly.

Aggregate. Disaggregate. Quickly. It’s how Americans utilize resources.

All the way or not at all

The appreciation that Germans have for individual competence and their aversion towards incalculable risks sometimes set the condition of a certain degree of caution used when working with innovations.

Therefore, it fits the bill that German companies always approach the execution of updates and improvements in a cautious and well thought-out manner. All of the pros and cons must be carefully weighed, and all influential factors taken into consideration before a critical decision is made.

In this case, a qualified expert will often be called in to assist. “Professional quality management is often the condition for the commissioning of tasks. This is often bound together with unnecessary effort, especially in the case of small businesses; often the incorporation of external consultants is better”, explained an expert from the Chamber of Crafts in an article.

And so there exist a plethora of external experts, consultants, institutions, and established norms for German business owners to turn to in case they should lose perspective in the tangle of modern innovation.

These exist to help to make well-founded and analytically grounded decisions. It has even developed into its own field of study at many technical and business colleges: studies to the systematic approach of solving problems and to the development of complete solutions have begun to fill textbooks and lesson plans.

These approaches help to calculate multiple types of risk in advance, thereby countering the deeply rooted nervousness that comes together with risks and unforeseen situations.

Limitless Resources

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) – French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America – wrote: “The country appears to stretch on forever and is of limitless resources. But, no matter how fast it grows, it will remain surrounded by resources it cannot possibly exhaust.”

Energy: The United States has more coal reserves than any other country in the world and represent one-quarter of the world’s total coal supply. The U.S. has 272 billion tons of coal reserves and uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year. At this rate, America’s 272 billion tons of coal reserves would last nearly 250 years.

According to the 2012 article “American Oil Growing Most Since First Well Signals Independence“ by Asjylyn Loder on bloomberg.com domestic output of oil grew by a record 766,000 barrels a day to the highest level in 15 years, government data shows, putting the nation on pace to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer by 2020.

Net petroleum imports have fallen by more than 38 percent since the 2005 peak, and now account for 41 percent of demand, down from 60 percent seven years ago, moving the United States closer to energy independence than it has been for decades.

Key natural resources: One-third of U.S. land is covered by forests (302 million hectares), making forestland the number one type of land use in the United States. One-fifth of U.S. land is timberland (204 million hectares), which is land capable of producing 1.38 cubic meters per hectare of industrial wood annually. 71 percent of all timberland in the U.S. is privately owned, while 29 percent is publicly owned.

Land: The United States has a land area of 3.8 million miles² (9.8 million km²) compared to 9.7 million km² in China, 0.36 million km² in Germany and 0.38 million km² in Japan.

Population density: United States population density per square mile is 84, compared to 365 for China, 609 for Germany, and 836 for Japan.

Immigrant experience

All Americans are descendants of immigrants. And the immigrant experience begins with risk-taking. All immigrants risk, to one degree or another, what they own and know. Taking that one great risk, that leap of faith, makes small most later decisions in life. Immigrants are, or have become, by their very nature risk-takers. Americans are risk-takers.

The American economic system encourages entrepreneurship. It pays in the U.S. to establish your own business. Businesses owners who enjoy high success do very well financially. Owners who enjoy medium success do well financially. Those, however, who enjoy low success do very poorly financially. “No risk, no reward.”

Small businesses – firms with fewer than 500 employees – drive the American economy by providing jobs for over half of the nation’s private sector workforce. Small businesses are job creators, representing 99.7% of all firms. They make up the following: 64% of net new private-sector jobs, 49.2% of private-sector employment, 46% of private-sector output, 43% of high-tech employment, 98% of firms exporting goods and 33% of exporting value.

Small businesses create more than half of the private non-farm gross domestic product and create 60-80% of net new jobs. 19.6 million Americans work for companies employing fewer than 20 workers, 18.4 million work for firms employing between 20 and 99 workers, and 14.6 million work for firms with 100 to 499 workers. 47.7 million Americans work for firms with 500 or more employees.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics small firms accounted for 64% of the net new jobs created or 11.8 million of the 18.5 million net new jobs between 1993 and 2011. Since the latest recession, from mid-2009 to 2011, small firms, led by the larger ones in the category (20-499) employees, accounted for 67% of the net new jobs.

Fracking

Fracking is a way of mining underground gas, but it has been linked to earthquakes and tap water that burns (at least when you run it over a lit match).

The method was first discovered during the American Civil War, when Union Colonel Edward Roberts noticed the effects of explosive Confederate artillery plunging into the narrow millrace (canal) near the battlefield.

Americans, who enjoy using any potential resource once it becomes apparent, soon began experimenting with the new procedure, and these days there are several fracking operations taking place in the US.

Although there have been attempts to legalize fracking in Germany, so far it seems like Germans would prefer not to risk the potentially dangerous method in order to gather new resources.

Impatience

According to a survey conducted in 2015, even though almost 80% of Americans consider themselves patient, a vast majority of them behave in ways that display incredible impatience. For example, 96% of Americans will consume food/drink that they know is hot enough to burn them rather than wait for it to cool. Additionally, 71% frequently exceed the speed limit and more than 50% won’t wait on hold for more than one minute.

“Paralysis by Analysis“

‘Paralysis by analysis’ – a phrase often used in the American business context – describes over-thinking that leads to a reluctance to make a decision, and in doing so exhausts the available time in which to act.

In Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Cat the fox boasts of hundreds of ways of escaping while the cat has only one. When they hear the hunting dogs approaching, the cat climbs quickly up a tree while the fox in his confusion was caught. The moral: “Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon.” In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes of Hamlet’s flaw of thinking too much: “sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.”

Analysis: ‘In the final (or last) analysis’ means when everything has been considered. This phrase is used to suggest that a statement expresses the basic truth about a complex situation. Late 16th century. Medieval Latin from Greek analusis, from analuein unloose.

Reluctance: Unwillingness or disinclination to do something. Ambivalence: The state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. Hesitation: The action of pausing or waiting before saying or doing something.

How fast?

The American tendency to work at a fast pace and aim for rapid results continues to confound Germans. They have difficulty identifying a logical and structured plan for action amongst their business dealings, and where Americans see hard work and flexibility in action, they suspect only chaos. When Germans feel overrun by American ‘decisionism’ and see their standards of quality and the rhythm of their own style of working as becoming endangered, this confusion can quickly transform into irritation.

“A bad decision is better than no decision.” There are few Americans likely to disagree with this popular saying. Germans, however, would tend towards saying the exact opposite. Sometimes even a good decision will find no supporters.

From the American perspective, it is the client who is the most significant factor in determining the deadline for a given decision. Americans value a client-oriented business model. Because Americans tend to operate under the assumption that this same dynamic exists in in Germany as well, they find it difficult to understand why their German colleagues would risk upsetting a customer over time wasted during the decision-making process.

Priorities and time factors can change during the process of making any decision. Americans prefer to divide this process up into multiple sub-processes or steps. The sequence of these steps must remain flexible – meaning that it should be possible to change their order, or even skip a step or two in between if necessary. From this point of view, the structured discipline of the German decision-making process can appear exceedingly rigid and in-flexible – occasionally appearing as though it would directly conflict with the purpose of the decision itself.

It is almost as though the decision-making process would be more important than the final decision. To Americans, the German approach of assigning so much importance to the process of making a decision as to possibly loose perspective of the final decision itself can seem rather paradoxical. For this reason, one might suspect that simple indecision is being masked by a seeming concern for ‘attention to detail’.

Of course the German understandings of process and customer relations play a role here (according to the motto: ‘The client wants a solution from us. Our processes guarantee a solution, so the client knows that he can wait.’) But surely there must be something more involved; Germans can see that during the process of making an important decision one must also make a series of decisions which are smaller, but not insignificant to the bigger picture. These decisions are key elements of a systematic (or self-perpetuating) approach, each de facto requiring more time for consideration.

Ultimately, whether or not the rebounding American approach – making quick decisions, then revising them just as quickly – is actually faster typically depends on the related events. ‘Wir haben mit Äpfeln und Birnen zu tun’ – you can’t compare apples and oranges (or pears). Nevertheless, there will always be those colleagues who will continue do do so, and continue to bicker.

Kahneman Quotes

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller.

„True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.“

„We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it’s the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we’ve already made the decision.“

„There’s a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.“

„Nobody would say, ‘I’m voting for this guy because he’s got the stronger chin,’ but that, in fact, is partly what happens.“

„It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.“

„We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.“

„We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.“

comprehensive

Comprehensive: covering completely or broadly. First known use 1614. Synonyms: all-embracing, all-inclusive, broad-gauge, compendious, complete, encyclopedic, cover-all, cyclopedic, embracive, exhaustive, full, global, inclusive, in-depth, omnibus, panoramic, thorough, universal. Antonyms: imperfect, incomplete, partial.