Altersteilzeit, negotiated into many German collective agreements: the employee moves to half hours over several years, with the employer topping up the pay and the pension contributions. The exit is treated as a process to be arranged rather than a date.
business
Pay for performance
American compensation is built in layers: base salary, annual bonus tied to individual and company results, equity, commission. A substantial share of pay for many roles is contingent and recalculated every year.
The what and the how
German engineering practice separates two documents, both defined in DIN 69901-5 and VDI 2519. The Lastenheft is written by the customer and states what is required and why — deliberately solution-neutral. The Pflichtenheft is written by the supplier in response and states how it will be built.
The what and the how are different documents, by different authors, in a fixed order, and together they form the contractual basis of the project.
The specification
The German Leistungsbeschreibung is written before quotations are sought, and a supplier who receives a vague one will say so. A client who does not yet know what he wants is not regarded as an early-stage opportunity. He is regarded as not yet ready to have the conversation.
Reengineering the Corporation
Hammer and Champy, 1993. One of the bestselling American business books ever published, and its instruction was to stop improving existing processes and abolish them. The subtitle was a manifesto for business revolution. Millions of American managers bought a book telling them their processes were the problem.
The two-week vacation
Two weeks is the common American starting allowance, rising with service to three or four. The German statutory minimum alone exceeds the American starting point, and most German collective agreements exceed it substantially — but this is a fact about American practice: the allowance is granted by the employer and begins low.
Name Your Own Price
Priceline built a business on inverting the transaction: the customer states a figure and the seller decides whether to take it. The mechanism only makes sense in a market where nobody believes the listed price is the real one.
Pivot
Startup vocabulary for abandoning your original idea and redirecting the company. It is not a word of failure — founders announce pivots. The term borrows from basketball, where the pivot foot stays planted while everything else turns.
Open plan
American offices removed the walls, and then largely kept them off, through decades of well-documented complaints about noise and interruption. The argument that held the line was not about cost. It was that people who can see each other share more than people who cannot.
The long relationship exception
The Federal Court of Justice has held that a customer in a long-standing supply relationship is not obliged to inspect immediately where he has received the same defect-free goods for years and the supplier changed the specification without telling him.
The duty to check relaxes in proportion to the trust earned — and the exception exists because the supplier broke the pattern silently.