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.
business
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.
Context, not control
Netflix published its culture document in 2009 and it was downloaded millions of times. Its argument was that a company should give people the context to decide well rather than processes to follow. It included an unlimited vacation policy and an expense policy of five words: act in Netflix’s best interests.
The Apple design principle
American consumer technology is sold on the claim that it can be used without instruction, and products are reviewed against it. A device that needs its manual read has failed a test that was applied before it shipped.
Social partnership
Sozialpartnerschaft. Social partnership. The standard German term for the relationship between employers and unions, used by both sides and by the government. Partners, not opponents. The word frames a negotiation that is genuinely adversarial as a joint undertaking, and the framing is taken seriously enough to shape the procedure.
The spare parts store
Das Ersatzteillager. German manufacturers commit to spare parts availability for long periods after a product line ends, and hold the inventory to do it. The obligation extends decades past the sale. The stock is held against a failure that has not occurred in a machine that may already have been scrapped.
The IPO price range
An American company going public announces a range, then builds a book of investor interest, then prices the offering — sometimes above the range, sometimes below. The company does not know what it is worth. It runs a process to find out.