anecdote

The young woman, Susan, an American, left in tears. Clearly she was inexperienced professionally. And her expectations were unrealistically high. And she had never worked for a German before.

Antje is a petite woman, with fine features, very expressive dark eyes. A perfectionist, correct in everything she does. But also warm-hearted in a quiet, considerate way. Antje wants the best for her team, especially for the younger women. She knows firsthand what it’s like to earn respect in a technology-based company run by men.

Susan had simply not met Antje’s expectations. Accordingly, their feedback discussion addressed unmet goals. Antje, not aware of how critique in the American context is best communicated, took the German approach, the only one she knows, with the only difference that the talk was in English.

Antje found Susan to be overly emotional, a bit naive about her ability, and unprepared for the discussion. At the same time, Antje saw raw potential in Susan. Her mind was quick, she worked hard, was willing to take on challenges. Antje had a plan to coach Susan along to her full potential, including getting corporate sponsorship for an evening MBA program at a well-respected university.

It wouldn’t come to be. Within a month Susan left Antje’s team, moving to a similar organization in another division. She had found Antje to be unfair and harsh.

I‘ve become friends with a woman in my neighborhood. Anna is new to Bonn, having moved here to take a sales job in a well known electronics and household appliance retailer, the largest chain in Germany and very successful.

Her sales training lasted four weeks. Based on what Anna told me it sounded very comprehensive and intense. The salespeople are expected to have deep technical knowledge of their products. And although they are trained in sales, as well as in how to interact with customers, it is clear that the emphasis is on the products as technical solutions.

For any of my readers who have spent time in such stores in Germany, and asked a sales person a question or two, you‘ll know what I mean about product knowledge. German salespeople can go into great depth, sounding at times as if they were involved in the product development process itself. The depth of information is often too much for us Americans. Asking a simple question seldom leads to a simple answer.

Help customers. Take pride in your work.

Such stores in Germany are called a Fachgeschäft, a term not easily translated into American English. The equivalent would be „a store with technical products, sold by staff who view themselves as experts, who will give you detailed information on the products, including letting you know what is best for you.“

What is the spirit in the hearts of these salespeople? Arrogance? Are they know-it-alls? Or is it Technikverliebheit (obsession with technology)? Those were certainly my impressions in my early years in Germany. But they haven‘t been for a long time. The spirit is: help the customer, be professional, take pride in your work, demonstrate respect.

And this spirit you‘ll find in the local bakeries, at the computer store (especially the Apple re-sellers), from restaurant servers, at the information desk of the Deutsche Bahn in any train station, at the post office, in the bookstore, with the butcher in the supermarket, and so on. And because it is deeply cultural, it is a shared logic. The German customer expects it.

Post-merger integration. A German company acquired an American company. They had been competitors for many years, and were two of the five major players in a global market . I would serve this German company over several years, going from one organization to the other, doing my best to ensure that the two cultures first understood each other before trying to integrate their approaches.

I was in the process of conducting a Check, an audit, from Latin to listen. The Check was a series of background interviews in one of the larger organizations within the merger. It‘s the first step in supporting my clients. I have to get a read on the situation, get to know the people, the issues, the recent history. Also, it‘s important that those people know who I am, what I do, how I do it, if they are to trust, and therefore open up to me. The Check is the basis for my support.

I conducted over seventy-five interviews across five locations in Germany and the U.S., with folks at all hierarchy levels, and in all disciplines: engineering, manufacturing, supply, sales/marketing, service, etc.

A furious pace, not thought through

At the very outset I encountered something new to me. The Americans complained time and again that there German colleagues were „revisiting“ certain key strategic decisions. It was not clear to me what they meant by that term. After a while, however, it did become clear.

Unfortunately, in many post-merger integration projects the companies involved – acquirer and acquired – feel that they have to make critical strategic decisions quickly, within a certain timeframe after closing. They discuss, debate and decide at a furious pace, often without first having understood each other, how the respective companies operate, the logic behind what they actually do.

One can imagine the stress, pressure and fear involved when folks are unsure how these decisions will play out. For most of them it‘s about job security. For some of them – high-level management – it‘s about power and prestige. In the case of this client, several decisions were made which had very high impact on large organizations and their locations, literally and directly on which organization will design, develop and manufacture what products and at which locations.

Power and back-room political deal-making

Two titans were battling each other within the same, newly formed, company. It was neither healthy, nor transparent, nor particularly pretty to observe. But apparently top-level management felt the need to make such decisions quickly.

„Revisiting.“ One of those strategic decisions did not go the way the German side of the organization had hoped and expected. They were angry, hurt, shocked. From their perspective the decision was clearly the wrong one. The Germans were convinced that it had not been made based on objective, factual, rational grounds, but instead on power, clever persuasion and perhaps even back-room political deal-making.

They were not willing – or not fully willing – to accept, therefore execute the decision. Over the months, and even years, they consciously sought out ways to challenge the decision. Large, complex companies offer opportunities to delay and disrupt high-level decisions. Execution can be clear and disciplined or unclear and undisciplined.

The American colleagues felt – but could not quite prove – that their German colleagues were undermining the decision. Their term was „revisiting.“

Disrupting, or pehaps threatening, the business?

Were the Germans disobeying a strategic decision? Were they being insubordinate? Were they running the risk of severe punishment should their „revisiting“-tactics be identified, documented and attributed to specific people, whether management or subject-area experts? Was their behaviour outrageous?

These were certainly the sentiments on the American side of the company. But, did the Germans go beyond what was considered acceptable company-internal politics? Was their behavior insubordinate? Did it question the overall decision-making authority of senior management, which was jointly American and German? Were the German colleagues disrupting, or pehaps threatening, the business?

From the American perspective it was yes in each case. But from the German perspective? This story is not about where the line runs between accepting and not – or not fully – accepting a decision in two business cultures, although that is a very relevant intercultural topic. Instead, this story is about understanding how the German culture – and therefore German business culture – defines „revisiting“ a decision.

„Führen mit Auftrag“

Go to our core content on Germany-Leadership and read about the German military‘s foundational leadership principle Führen mit Auftrag. The following quotes indicate what‘s operating in the German mind when they feel that a decision is suboptimal, not workable, or just plain wrong:

„The mistakes of senior commanders are often rectified by the troops below.“ Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), Prussian General, author of On War.

„Sir, the King of Prussia has made you an officer of the Prussian Army, so that you know when not to obey an order!“ Prince Friedrich Karl to a Major in the Prussian Army (1870)

„In reality, the Germans owe their final victory to the enormous amount of independently-minded and innovative junior officers in all positions all the way down to the very lowest ranks.“ Russian General Woide on the Franco-Prussion War of 1870/71

„The most unfortunate officer in the field, is the one who is distracted by headquarters with daily, even hourly requests for reports on his strategy, tactics and intentions, quite often from an overly self-important junior staff officer with access to a telegraph line.“ General Helmuth Moltke, Head of the Prussian General Staff

„War demands iron discipline of troops and exceedingly tight coordination of forces. In the heat of battle, however, of highest importance are officers and soldiers trained to think and act independently and spontaneously.“ Prussian officer training manual of 1906

„ … in those cases, in which the junior-officer comes to the conclusion that his commander is no longer in a position to judge the situation, and where his order has been rendered inadequate by events, it is the expressed responsibility and duty of that junior-officer to either redefine or ignore the order.“ Prussian officer training manual of 1906

„Führen mit Auftrag is an extraordinarily broad and involved term, which includes all-encompassing aspects of current doctrine concerning the essence of war, characteristics of leadership, tactics, the leadership of troops, the relationship of senior to junior officers to each other and to soldiers, as well as training and education. In addition, these aspects are formulated systematically in a way which allows them to both mutually support each other and to make them inseparable.“ An American Army Officer (1987)

German leadership logic tolerates . . . 

This thinking is very uncommon in the American culture. In fact, it is antithetical to it. German leadership logic accepts – and in many cases expects – that people working on the tactical level either revise, in some cases reject, important decisions which they view to be suboptimal, not workable, or just plain wrong.

This is worth repeating. The German leadership logic – which is a logic shared by both those who lead and those who are being led (a shared logic) – allows for what Americans (and perhaps other cultures) would call „revisiting“ or disobeying. The Germans would not call it disobeying a decision.

Germans would say that they are doing their job, which is to interpret and then execute a decision based on their analysis of the situation „on the ground.“ In other words, they see it not only as their job, what they get paid for, but at a deeper level their duty to the company, their customers, and the communities in which these people live, to re-interpret, re-address, slow down, even block decisions which they believe are wrong.

The battle over this strategic decision

This is one reason why the German leadership logic stresses decisions, tasks, mandates, missions which are generally-formulated, which are not highly-defined, not prescriptive. This allows for room for interpretretation. This approach applies also to high-level strategic decisions.

Now certainly there were individual, surely selfish, motives involved in this particular case. Germans are people, too. From the German perspective – and the battle over this strategic decision went on for years – they had very concrete, objective, business-driven reasons for why the decison was wrong.

What was not apparent to the Americans, however, was the German leadership logic and its encouragement of analyzing and interpreting decisions critically before executing them. It goes against the cliché Americans, and many other cultures, have of the Germans as being totally disciplined in executing the order or commands handed down by their superiors.

Much of this cliché is based on American movies and documentary films focused on the Germany of the Third Reich, under the control of the National Socialists. Those portrayals, however, offer an incomplete picture, at best. In fact, the German military during the Second World War operated, as it had in all previous wars going back to the early 1800s, under the foundational leadership principle of Führen mit Auftrag, which was not top-down, command-and-control, hierarchical, but actually quite the opposite.

MerriamWebster online defines ‘to decide’ as: to make a final choice or judgment; to select as a course of action; to infer on the basis of evidence, to conclude; to bring to a definitive end; to induce to come to a choice.

I have always been of the opinion that Germans, in many ways, do not like to make decisions. It makes them feel a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps that is why decision making processes are so important to them. If those processes are well-constructed, are lived exactly, if the decision making options are filtered out stringently, the right decision will rise to the surface, will reveal itself.

We address this logic in the content on Persuasion, for persuasion and decision making are closely linked with one another. Intuition is defined as: quick and ready insight; immediate apprehension or cognition; knowledge or conviction gained by intuition; the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. When I read this in MerriamWebster it occurred to me that Germans are very careful about trusting their intuition.

The German people has a different understanding (sense) of risk than the Americans. They aim to hold onto, to make secure. ‘Häusle bauen’ or literally to build their little house, meaning to establish permanence, predictability, security. The Germans purchase insurance policies of every kind.

They are disciplined in ‘putting money on the high shelf’, meaning ‘saving for a rainy day’. I believe that most Germans would prefer to be civil servants as a way of reducing to an absolute minimum risks inherent in life. Civil servant status is the ultimate in professional risk reduction.

Ugly surprises form a people’s sense of risk

When we make these comparisons we make them along a kind of bell, or Gaussian, curve. Of course there are many, very many, risk-taking entrepreneurs and business people, who are moving technology into new and fascinating areas. So there is a certain distribution. We’re interested in a comparison, however, of the two respective bell curves, the German and the American.

I can understand the German understanding of risk very well. It begins with Germany’s geographical situation. The Alps in the south provide a natural border defending them. But in the West, East and in the North the topography is flat. The German people were always surrounded by several countries, who, at different times, were friendly or not so friendly.

German lands were not blessed with opulent resources. War in Europe was commonplace in every century, practically in every generation. At times the Germans were the aggressors, at times the victims. One only need to open up a history book in order to read about insecurity, instability, and sudden change brought on by power struggles. All these have informed and formed the German understanding of risk.

What if my grandmother had been born in Bonn, Germany on April 3, 1900, instead of in Cincinnati, Ohio? She would have grown up in an upper class (bürgerlich) family in Wilhelmine Germany, the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The First World War erupted on August 1, 1914. At the end of the Great War in 1918 she would have been eighteen years old. Germany lost that war. Many young men on all sides died. Then hunger broke out in many parts of Germany, possibly in Bonn, also.

Her world came crashing down. The shame of a lost war. The Versailles Treaty and its one-sided, unfair reparations burdened on defeated Germany. Then the Weimar Republic and all of its political instability. The Rhineland, where Bonn is located, is occupied by foreign troops. Then the hyperinflation with workers transporting their weekly pay in wheelbarrows. Savings gone almost overnight. Then, with the economy finally improving, with hope on the horizon, the Wall Street crash of September 1929 ushering in the Great Depression.

Sense of measure gone

1930. My grandmother is then thirty years old with three children. The political and social climate in Germany becomes more and more radicalized. The National Socialists (Nazis) have the say. The unemployed are put to work. The economy takes off. Political repression is plain for all to see, and for many to experience.

The Germans – not all, but most – trade their freedom in a totalitarian state for security. Those who do not go along are brutalized. My grandmother and her husband do their best to avoid any and all kinds of danger, do their best not to be noticed, to “keep their heads down”, not to go along with, but also not be against. A day doesn’t pass without them both having to make careful calculations about what they say and do.

What will all this lead to? What will the future bring? Events develop at a quickening pace. Everyday Germans have difficulty judging and calculating the situation. All sense of measure is gone. No one can speak openly. Prague falls. Austria is annexed. The invasion of Poland in September 1939. France is defeated within six weeks!

Then the invasion of Russia in June 1941. The USA enters the war. Germany is bombed from the air day in and day out. The Germans are defeated at Stalingrad in 1943. Patton and the Americans cross the Rhine at Remagen, just south of Bonn. The Russians take mile for mile of territory in the East. At the end of the war Germany lay in ruins.

My grandmother is forty-five years old. Her husband was killed on the Eastern front. A bombing raid on Bonn, the unimportant university-town on the Rhine, in October 1942 destroys their house. Grandmother and her children stay with relatives in Euskirchen not far away.

Lived in four epochs

Wilhelmine Germany up until and during World War I. The Weimar Republic after the war. Then then National Socialists. Post-1945 occupied again by foreign troops. The first few winters are bitter cold. There is a shortage of everything. But the Spring arrives. The Germans don’t ever give up so quickly. They build a country. A state is established. Their new currency is stable and strong.

They have friends, allies, an alliance which defends and protects their young West German state. People slowly but surely rebuild their lives. “Made in Germany.” My grandmother is fifty-five years old. She can begin to relax a bit. The experiences, the imprint, run deep, however. Four eras she lived in and through.

There would come another. My grandmother dies in March of 1994, after a long and difficult life. But in October 1990 she would experience the unification of the two German states. She, as well as Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall, survived the Cold War.

For me, born in 1959, this is all history, exciting, fascinating, present today. I am an American. I was not a part of this history, not even related to it. No relatives of mine fought in the Second World War. No bombs fell from the sky on the town and cities of my American parents or grandparents. Americans did not experience severe hunger. No foreign troops occupied American soil. No raping of women old and young. None of the terrible things, experieced either as perpetrator or victim.

A people’s understanding of risk (Risikoverständnis) – with that I mean what is in the soul of a people, deep down, linked to concrete experiences, based on concrete decisions – the German understanding of risk I can imagine, I can nachvollziehen (to trace back), I can understand. It is not the American understanding of risk.

Maybe I, as an American, like in any culture, have blinders on. Maybe, despite after more than twenty-five years in Germany, I still have a national-cultural blindspot.

Perhaps we in the U.S. are just as interested in norms and standards as in Germany. We seek them out, want them, want to force them onto reality, even onto other people. But I don’t think we do. 

Even if so, not as much as the Germans do. Perhaps the “rich and powerful” in the U.S. force their norms and standards on the “common people” in such a clever way that they don’t even notice it.

I do notice, however, time and again, in discussions with many Americans how much they resist gaining distance, separating themselves from a given situation, in order to get abstract, to recognize patterns, deeper lying drivers, even principles which are at play. 

They react to my questions as if they did not quite understand them, or never considered such questions, or wonder why in the world I would even ask them.

At first I thought “Ok, they simply don’t understand me intellectually” or “They clearly have never thought about these things before” or “Hmm, they have so little experience working with another culture that they have never made the contrast.” 

Maybe it’s something else. Maybe the Americans I have been speaking to think: “What strange questions. So theoretical. So far away from the situation on the ground, from reality.”

I think Americans quickly and rather matter of fact say to themselves – or to me – “Deductive. Inductive. Who cares? We’re in business to make money. And we do that by meeting the needs of our customers.”

They are saying in order words, our processes – how we do the work – aren’t deduced vertically from some principles. They are rooted in customer needs, in the free market, in competition with other companies. 

Everything we do – the what and the how – is oriented on our customers. The overarching fact – the reality of things – is the dynamic between customer and supplier. The market – all of those interactions – has the say, and not some principles floating up in the clouds.

I remain standing ten or fifteen minutes. I imagine as best I can a summer day back during one of those years. What was life like in any of the houses, the homes, in that neighborhood? Just around the corner is the Karthäuserplatz, a small square, where I lived from 1991-95. In a three-room apartment on the third floor. 

On the first two floors lived three sisters, all in their 80’s, never married. Born in the early 1910’s they would remember the last years of the First World War, and most certainly all too well the entire Second World War. I imagine what it was like for them. Did they have brothers? Did those men/boys fight, kill, die? Catholics in the German Rhineland.

I imagine, see the pictures move by in my mind‘s eye. Three brothers. Second World War. Wehrmacht. The one dies in the early days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The second survives the 1944 Ardennenoffensive – what Americans call the Battle of the Bulge – only to then die in Vienna in early 1945, not long before the end of the war. 

The third brother survives the war, including several years as a prisoner in Russia. Their mother (the father had died in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI) and the three sisters pick him up one summer day in 1949 upon his arrival in Bonn by train via Berlin. Within a year and a half he would die of gangrene.

I am fifty-five years old. All of my brothers – two older, two younger – are still alive. None of us has killed or been killed. My son, Daniel, was born in May 1998. His mother is German. He is a German-American boy, more German than American. A school project in History. The fourth grade. 

The children are asked to find in Bonn the evidence, indications, the signs that once, many centuries ago, the Romans had lived in what became Bonn. He and his mother take a long walking tour. Bonn is a small town. Daniel is excited. He soaks it all in. My son, by boy, is growing up in Germany. He is learning to think historically. He is learning to understand his present. He is being prepared to deal with the future.

So many people on the German side. Especially in central functions. Who have so much time on their hands. Producing so many powerpoint presentations. Conduct so many long-winded discussions. Going into such great detail.

The Americans call them bureaucrats, who create processes, in order to justify their jobs in the company. “Make work.” German bureaucracy is there, say Americans, “to feed the village.”

Germans and Americans come together to discuss their collaboration, including to discuss their processes. They don’t know each other, are wary of each other, want to defend and protect their work, how they work, demonstrate that their processes are effective.

In many cases – perhaps most – people are convinced that their processes are good, and that they live them. But many Americans have a cliché-view of the Germans. They strike the table with their fist and say: „We will do it this way and not that way!“ And German behavior can at times appear to support that cliché.

The truth is, German colleagues are also convinced that their approaches work. And why not? Unfortunately, many of them are not proficient enough in English, and they, too, are unsure of themselves, perhaps feel the need to force their point across, strongly, vehemently. I don’t have a problem with that. But, many Americans do: „totally inflexible Germans with their inflexible German processes.“

In addition to these tensions you have the fact that Germans tend not to document their processes. Often they refuse to do so. When they do document, however, the formulation is usually general, with little detail.

Why? For one, the written word in the German culture has a high degree of binding character. Germans are very reluctant to tie their hands via detailed processes and procedures which then obligate them to do their work in specific ways. Another reason is that many Germans don’t want to share their knowhow. They don’t want it to be transferrable.

This is not so much about “information is power”, but far more about job-security. And then, of course, they see very little value in taking the time to carefully and clearly write things down. Their thinking is: Institutional knowledge is there. Folks know what they are supposed to do, when, how and why.

And, Germans develop competences differently than Americans. First learn, then do. They work in specific areas for a longer period of time, developing deep-dive knowledge and experience. And they get a sense for the what other departments close to theirs do. 

Depth and breadth. Continuity and consistency. Kaminaufstieg – move up within the smokestack or the silo – is the term they use. They build expertise, become experts. And experts, Germans would say, don’t need document how the work is done. They have it in their heads.

Documented or not documented, either way it remains a mystery to Americans when Germans “stick to the letter of the law” (process discipline) and when they permit themselves to ignore the process (process deviation). 

On the one side stubborn, dogmatic Germans and their inflexible processes. On the other, little to no process documentation, and doing things they way they simply want to. And when they do deviate from the process they may not even bother informing their boss. Very confusing.

“Nicht über den eigenen Tellerrand hinaus zu schauen,” literally to not look beyond the rim of your own plate, is as negative a criticism as having an underdeveloped Problembewusstsein, problem-consciousness. Such people don’t recognize connections, interconnections, and interdependencies (the complexity). They sort of stumble along without fully grasping the broader context within which they do so. They have plenty of facts at hand, and can tell entertaining stories based on their experience, but fundamentally cannot “put two and two together.”

Germans are no fans of anecdotes in general anyway. They consider anecdotes to be uncertified, unauthenticated pseudo-documents, un-proofed by an official body or organization. Anecdotes are subjective, therefore invalid, worthy of being challenged. Germans expect theory which helps objectify facts and numbers, offering a clean method for understanding complexity.

Germans would roll their eyes when confronted in a typical American bookstore by those tall, narrow kiosk-like stands pushing how-to books with titles such as “10 Easy Steps to a Successful Marriage,“ “5 Simple Ways to Become a Millionaire,“ “Start Your Own Company in 3 Weeks,“ “A Successful Family in Ever Way,“ each of them amounting to no more than 150 pages.

“You stupid Americans, with your bullshit pragmatism!”

Germans are capable of being focused and to-the-point. It’s those “easy steps” which make them nervous. Perhaps it’s a part of Anglo-American pragmatism. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Georg (yes, yet another anecdote). 1982, my very first year in Germany. He was the boyfriend of the daughter in the family I lived with in a small town south of Bonn.

Hardly had I met him and Georg got right down to business. As a junior officer in the Bundeswehr, the German Army, he asked me if Reagan and the U.S. would defend West Germany if the Russians and the Warsaw Pact attacked. I tried to give him a credible response, but was not exactly prepared for that kind of question as a twenty-two year old who had just graduated from college. I was not persuasive. Georg ended the conversation abruptly and in a huff mumbling under his breath, yet audible enough: “Ihr blöden US-Amerikaner mit Eurem scheiß Pragmatismus!”, literally you stupid Americans, with your bullshit pragmatism!

I shrugged my shoulders and continued on my way in life. In the quarter century since then I have thought often about that interaction. It was the thought that pragmatism could be “scheiße.“ To think and act pragmatically was a principle I had never challenged. What could possibly be wrong with pragmatism?

A few years back I interviewed an American expert on processes. He works in a German multinational company with a very large presence in the U.S. He and his German colleagues had been working for months on aligning their processes.

The Germans wanted very much to harmonize the processes. “harmonize” is a dirty word for the Americans. It conjures up scenes of horror. They were making very little progress. On the contrary, they were bickering. And how did the American process guy respond to my question about deductive or inductive? “What is this a university seminar in philosophy?”

He then explained. As the process expert in the organization he stays in close contact with those colleagues who move the business forward, those in the “engine room.” He knows their world, their problems, what’s going on. He accompanies, observes, asks questions, listens. Then he reflects, proposes, presents, discusses. Modifying existing processes, or introducing entirely new ones, is based on knowledge and understanding of the situation “on the ground.”

The collaboration between the doers and the process expert is close and integrated. Process people need to know the business, the key people, and the work, before they can address how the work is done.

As an American, I understand this. But, isn’t it critical that the process person take a step back, get some distance, in order to understand and analyze it all? Isn’t abstraction – getting abstract – the prerequisite for solid analysis?

Could it be that getting abstract is so self-stated in the German context, that they neglect to explain to their American colleagues that they also do their homework, that they also do the field work, interviewing and understanding those who do the work day in and day out?

I suspect that the German colleagues present their results – modified or new processes – straight from the process laboratory so to speak, after already having gotten abstract on the key factors – let’s call them principles.

This German approach implies – therefore understood by all involved – that there is a natural, and healthy, tension between getting into the details of how the work is done, and gaining enough distance from them in order to understand them. 

The logic is: “The deeper I go into the details, or get pulled into the details, the more difficult it will be to recognize the drivers, the key factors, the patterns. I need distance. I need my laboratory.”

If the German approach to processes is difficult for Americans to grasp, and therefore accept, what makes it even more difficult is their impression that their German colleagues do not understand the American market, how Americans do business. They see processes coming from the German process lab which don’t work in the U.S., that can potentially damage the business.

That big stick is wielded by Americans often and swiftly: “You folks don’t know our market, how we work, what it means to be successful here. You failed here in the U.S. with your German approach. That’s why you acquired us. So please don’t make changes to our processes, don’t introduce any new processes, without first speaking with us and then allowing us to adapt what you propose to our situation!”

„No taxation without representation!“ That was one of the battle cries of the American colonists. They revolted. The British, a world power then, were defeated. The United States of America was formed.

Americans learn at a very early age, in grammar school, that intelligence is the ability to simplify complexity, to break it down into segments, in order to understand and deal with it. Americans are pragmatic. Knowledge has true value when you can do something with it. Knowledge is of no value if it is not actionable. In English composition in school young Americans learn to construct short, clear and logical sentences. This is the pattern, the foundation, for just about all forms of written communication.

I remember all too well an at first surprisingly – but earned – poor grade I received for a paper I wrote on the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. I was a student of History at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It was the Fall semester of 1980, my senior year, the last of four years. It was a beautiful October day, warm and sunny. Indian Summer. I attended a two semester course on German History, the beginning of my fascination with Germany. I simply could not get enough of it, about Germany and the Germans, articles, books, including Gerhard Ritter’s classic.

Apparently my fascination and excitement got away from me. I produced a ten-page paper of complicated confusion – unstructured and unclear. My professor, Michael Foley, one of the greats at Georgetown, took a knife to it. Red all over it. His commentary at the end: “Magee, what kind of nonsense is this. You write like a German!” 

Professor Foley most surely did not mean that Germans can’t think, read or write. As an historian he was quite aware that the German people had produced many of the greatest historians of the modern era, and that the methods of historians originated in Germany. Instead he wanted to convey: “Dear John, first get clarity on what it is you wish to communicate. Then do so in simple, clear and straightforward sentences.”

Keep it simple, stupid!

And he was right! It is part of the American national cultural hard-wiring to believe (and say) that one has truly understood something if and when they can communicate it. “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it.” It’s an assumption which every American operates on: “If you can’t explain it to the average Joe, you don’t understand it.” It’s considered a high art form in the U.S. to be able to explain complex matters to the “man on the street.” It’s been said many times that Konrad Adenauer was a master of this art form.

I understood this about Adenauer many years later, during research on my Master‘s thesis about the disagreements between the Kennedy and Adenauer administrations during the Second Berlin Crisis, 1961-63. Through my studies I had become quite familiar with Chancellor Adenauer. His extraordinary ability to communicate with the “average Joe” was particularly effective in the early post-War years in West Germany. During one of the great national debates in the Bundestag about West German foreign policy Adenauer contrasts starkly his policy to that of the opposition Social Democrats by shouting: “Und wir wählen die Freiheit!” (We choose freedom!).

In the U.S. business context people speak of KISS: ‘Keep it simple, stupid!’ There, again, is the American logic about how to deal with complexity: “If you are truly intelligent, then you know how to make it simple, so that simple folks can understand it.” Perhaps this has to do with democracy and market economics. For what use is it to politicians to formulate complex arguments which are not understood by voters? Is it any different with companies marketing their products and services?

Story-telling activates the human imagination

This is also a reason why it is anecdotes, if well-told and -timed, are enormously persuasive in the American cultural context. For Americans anecdotes are empirical. They are reality experienced, the opposite of theory, which is often seen as abstract and unrealistic, separated from reality. An anecdote says: “I know what I’m talking about. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. This is no theory, it’s reality!” Any American politician, for example, speaking in their legislative district or in the media about a difficult issue, such as the war in Iraq, will come across as especially convincing if they can claim to have visited that region.

Like aphorisms, anecdotes transport deeper-lying wisdom. Isn’t that what the Bible – Old and New Testament – does via one story after the other, communicate the deepest-felt, and therefore most complex, beliefs of a people, of Jews and Christians? Isn’t story-telling the highest, the most sophisticated, form of activating (speaking) to human imagination? Truly persuasive communicators in the U.S. plan very carefully when they draw on anecdotes. This is why we all listen so carefully when our grandparents tell their stories. They have the years of human experience.