Patterns – Countries – Page 3

What Can Germans Teach Us About Privacy?

Asking delicate questions in Berlin, the capital of personal data protection

In Berlin this week, I’ll be trying to better understand how Germans are thinking about the surveillance debate that has roiled the free world in recent months. Conventional wisdom has it that citizens of this country are particularly attuned to the importance of privacy due to Stasi excesses during Communist rule.

Has the resonance of the issue been overstated, as some observers suggested after the recent parliamentary election, when Chancellor Angela Merkel triumphed even as privacy advocates in the Pirate Party seemed to lose ground?

Wheeling and dealing

Expressions like ‘It’s not personal, it’s just business’ and ‘Everything is negotiable’ illustrate the American view that negotiation is a standard, unemotional aspect of doing business. The term ‘wheeling and dealing’ further reinforces the notion that successful individuals are those who can negotiate skillfully and assertively.

Wary Germans hate sharing their data. Will they use a Covid-19 tracking app?

LondonCNN Business —

European governments are racing to develop apps that can track the spread of the coronavirus to prevent a second wave of infections when the economy reopens.

Germany is further along than most, and hopes to have an app ready to download within a few weeks. But details are scarce, and if the app is to succeed, Germans will have to overcome a widespread reluctance to share data with authorities that is rooted deep in the country’s history during the Nazi period and under Communist rule in East Germany.

“The skepticism of Germans in terms of data protection is remarkable when it comes to sharing data [with the government],” said University of Mannheim Professor Sebastian Siegloch, who has studied German attitudes toward surveillance and privacy.

What’s said is said.

Was gesagt ist, ist gesagt. What’s said is said. This statement emphasizes that you have to stand by your words. Once statements have been made, they are considered binding, and backtracking makes you appear unreliable and weak.

What Goes on in a Perfectionist’s Brain

Many people see perfectionism as essential for success. After all, setting high standards and achieving big goals can feel very rewarding.

Researchers at the University of Cologne wanted to get a better sense of perfectionism at the neurobiological level.

Not only that, high Personal Standard Perfectionism scorers’ brain activity also showed a slowing-down process after they made errors, which could allow them to learn from their mistakes and eventually correct course.

What is Bringschuld?

According to German law (§ 269 BGB) the obligation to deliver is one of the three types of obligation that determine the place of performance. In this case, the debtor must render the service at the creditor’s place of residence. This is where performance success also occurs.

Ms. X would like to redecorate her apartment and buys a couch from a furniture store. Due to the nature of the purchase contract, the company owes Mrs. X the delivery of the piece of furniture. The debt is only settled in Ms. X’s apartment, until then the furniture company is liable for the loss of or damage to the goods.

What Happened in Chattanooga?

2014. The recent vote by workers in a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee to decline representation by the United Auto Workers union (UAW) highlights the differences in labor policies between the United States and Germany.

With American union membership on the decline, this was the first time that the UAW attempted to represent workers in a foreign company in over a decade, and its failure sets a precedent for the future of unions in the American South.

Looking to its successes in Germany and elsewhere, Volkswagen was in favor of creating a German-style “works council” in Chattanooga that, due to American labor laws, would require the UAW to represent workers’ interests.

This was met with mixed reviews. In particular, workers worried that voting for union representation would scare away production of a new model of SUV, despite VW’s assurances that the UAW vote would have no effect on the decision to manufacture the SUV in Chattanooga. Politics also played a role in the outcome.

In the politically conservative South, several Tennessee government officials, with the help of anti-union action committees, were able to lead a successful campaign against the union. Some lawmakers warned that VW might not receive new tax incentives to expand in the state if the UAW was successful at the VW plant.

Furthermore, many workers were reportedly happy with current wages, felt that the company treated them well, and did not want the union to damage or muddy that dynamic. The vote has left Volkswagen still looking for a way to create a works council, even without the UAW.

What Are Organizational Silos?

For a business to be successful, it’s important for employees to share ideas and work well together. Organizational silos can affect how employees interact with one another. As a manager, understanding the pros and cons of organizational silos can enable you to communicate effectively with every member of your team. In this article, we discuss the definition of organizational silos and how you can dismantle them.

Who Benefits When Salary Info Is Public?

This month, laws went into effect in California and Washington State that required companies to post salary ranges on job listings. Like similar rules in New York City and Colorado, lawmakers passed them on the premise that pay transparency helped reduce wage gaps.

There’s little debate among researchers that this is the case. “It is totally 100 percent true across all the studies I’ve seen, with very few exceptions,” Zoe Cullen, an economist at Harvard Business School, said. Pay transparency laws are “very good” at reducing wage disparities, she added.

But that’s not the end of the story. As companies embrace pay transparency — either because the law forces them to, or because their employees are becoming more comfortable disclosing their salaries anyway — both employers and workers have noticed ripple effects. It’s changing how bosses set salaries. And it has the potential to make life a little less lucrative for star performers.

What is business agility

Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.

In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An extension of this concept is the agile enterprise, which refers to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success. Business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence.