Americans change fields, not only employers, and the career-change is a recognised genre with its own advice literature, bootcamps and retraining programmes. Arriving from outside a field is treated as a credential of adaptability.
business
The closer
An American sales title and an American compliment. She’s a closer. The praise is for the ability to convert a conversation into an agreement, treated as a distinct capability from anything preceding it.
Signing authority
Der Prokurist. A German commercial role defined in the Commercial Code, carrying wide legal authority to act for the company and entered in the commercial register. The holder signs ppa. before their name. It is an advancement expressed as legal capacity rather than as a place on an organisation chart.
Business intelligence
American software vendors named an entire product category after the idea that data becomes valuable when it changes what someone does. Not data management, not information systems. Intelligence — a word borrowed from the military, where the whole point of knowing something is the decision it enables.
Holding the pen
Federführung — the quill-leading. The German term for which department holds the pen on a document, a project or a negotiation. It is contested openly, because whoever drafts determines what is discussed.
The MBA
The American general management degree is taken by engineers, lawyers, teachers and officers, and its premise is that management is a transferable discipline. Roughly two hundred thousand are awarded in the United States each year.
The dealmaker
An American occupational identity. Investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, sports representation, entertainment — all have a recognised role whose skill is bringing parties to agreement. The title is not a euphemism. It is on the business card.
Two kinds of superior
German organisations distinguish the technical superior from the disciplinary one. Two different people, two different kinds of authority, and the split is normal enough to have standard vocabulary. Authority over the work and authority over the person are treated as separate things that need not sit together.
The specialist track
Die Fachlaufbahn. The specialist career track. Larger German companies maintain a technical progression path running parallel to the management one, with equivalent grades and equivalent pay. The existence of the structure is the evidence. It concedes that a valuable person may not want to manage anybody, and builds a way for them to rise anyway.
The works agreement
A Betriebsvereinbarung between employer and works council binds both and governs how work is organised. Negotiating one is a genuine contest, and its terms determine daily working life more directly than most management decisions.