This is a comment on a Wall Street Journal article vom March 17, 2025 entitled: “Job Seekers Hit Wall of Salary Deflation – The salary bump that people who switch jobs used to command has vanished.”
“Going for the money as the big motivator for a job has not been the best personal career choice. Location and challenging work are much better career decision criteria. Constantly providing extra value to your manager and your manager’s managers is always a strong career strategy.”
If you ask most Americans who they work for, they will name their immediate boss. If you ask a German they will name their company. If you ask that German to be more specific they will name the division. Ask further and they will say the department. Rarely would they name their immediate boss or anyone in management.
A fascinating article in the New York Times about how a few major U.S. companies are handling the post-Covid work environment. Some employees are returning full-time to the office. Others are working exlusively, or almost excluisively from home. And many are splitting the time between office and home.
There are, of course, consequences for each choice. And in the U.S. some companies are concerned about reduced opportunities for those folks who are less present in the office. Why? Reduced face-time with management.
This is a clear statement about the nature of leadership in the U.S. business environment: Get face-time with your boss !
If you collaborate with Germans, ask them if less face-time with management would be a disadvantage or an advantage. And when you do, read to them, as best you can this, well-know, German figure of speech: “Gehe nicht zu Deinem Fürst, wenn Du nicht gerufen wirst.”
Phonetically: Gae nisht tsu die nem first, venn doo nisht gae-roofen veerst.
The Office is an American comedy television series adapted from a British series of the same name. The series depicts the everyday lives of office employees in a branch of a fictional paper company.
The office’s manager, Michael Scott, constantly interrupts his workers in an attempt to inspire them and win their approval. His efforts usually fail in a humorous way. Although this is a comedy, the manager’s frequent attempts to keep updated on his employees’ work and interact with them personally is similar to actual office environments.
President Abraham Lincoln was know for making unscheduled visits to Union officers and troops. Successful American leaders never lose touch with their people. Conversely, capable team members find ways to remain in constant communication with their team lead and other important members of management.
In his book A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (2010) author Neil Sheehan describes the life and work of Bernard Schriever, who is considered to be the father of the American nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Schriever and his military and civilian colleagues believed firmly that if both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed these weapons of mass destruction the probability of them being used actually would be decreased.
Schriever had to overcome strong institutional resistance within the U.S. Air Force whose leadership was convinced that manned aircraft﹣strategic long-range bombers﹣was the only way to maintain a credible deterrent against the Soviet Union.
Through telling the story of Bernard Schriever and the development of the American ballistic missile program from the end of Second World War up to the mid-1960s Sheehan tells the history of the Cold War, which would last up until the 1990s with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of West and East Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and the freedom of Eastern Europe from Russian domination.
In a 2010 television interview (Booknotes on C-SPAN) Sheehan contrasted Schriever with his American-born military colleagues, Generals Paul Harkins and William Westmoreland, both who had overall command of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War.
Schriever would tell his subordinates that he would never fire anyone for failing, but instead for failing to inform him immediately of problems. For Schriever, as stated by Sheehan, success would take care of itself if one focused on solving the problems at hand. Go to minutes 25:10 to 26:50.
Sheehan had been a young war correspondent in Vietnam for United Press International (UPI), later with the New York Times. As told in his book A Bright Shining Lie (1989), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the American generalship during the Vietnam War was unwilling to accept that America was losing that war.
General Schriever, according to Sheehan‘s research, made clear time and again to the members of this organization, whether military or civilian, that he wanted timely and accurate reports on the problems the program was experiencing, and was far less interested in the progress made.
So-called progress reports had become common within the U.S. military after the Second World War, and according to Sheehan, symptomatic for an institution unwilling to face what was not working.
Bernard Adolph Schriever was born in 1910 in the German port city of Bremen. His father was an engineer. They immigrated to the U.S. only months before the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917.
Schriever grew up in New Braunfels, Texas, an area mostly populated by German immigrants. Read about his fascinating life in Wikipedia
One way to get a sense for the importance of short lines of communications within an American team is to observe those lines. Team meetings: How often are they scheduled? How long do they last? Who takes part in them? What topics are addressed? How much detail do they go into?
Team or staff meetings play an important role in American teams. They help management and the team maintain an overview of their most important work. Information flow is supported. Current developments, problems, complexities can be addressed immediately. If well run, staff meetings can be motivating. Management remains „in touch“ with the team.
Frequent meetings are standard practice in the American business culture. According to the National Statistics Council, 37% of managers and white collar worker time is spent in meetings. Other data indicate there are 11 million business meetings every day or roughly 3 billion meetings per year. According to a Verizon study, „Busy professionals attend over 60 meetings each month. However, most say they cannot attend all meetings to which they are invited due to the tremendous demands on their time.“
The Verizon study found that “different meeting types were characterized by different patterns of meeting purposes. On average, in-person meetings are more likely to be sales-related, video conferences are more likely to be centered around updates and information-sharing, and audio conferences tend to consist of updates, brainstorming, and strategy development.”
According to a study done by the University of Tulsa and the University of Arizona, about 25 percent of American business meetings were between 31 and 61 minutes long. “The average time participants spend to prepare for, travel to, and attend an in-person meeting involving five people is 53 hours and 24 minutes. This is more than three times the time involved in an audio or video conference meeting.”
When meetings are required somebody must decide who should be invited and who should be excluded. One researcher found that “not having the ‘right’ people is one of the leading causes of unproductive meetings.” More than a third (34%) of 3M Study participants report only some (30%) relevant people attended meetings.
A common complaint from American businesspeople is that key decision makers are not present at meetings. Therefore, much time is wasted discussing topics that no one at the table has the authority to make decisions about.
However, another study encourages meeting planners to exclude senior-level leadership if at all possible. “Avoid and resist senior managers and directors attending your meetings unless you can be sure that their presence will be positive, and certainly not intimidating. Senior people are often quick to criticize and pressurize without knowing the facts, which can damage team relationships, morale, motivation and trust.”
Social Media: forms of electronic communication (such as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. First known use: 2004.
Most of the earliest and most prominent social networking software has been developed by Americans. Some examples include:
Myspace – founded by Americans Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003. It allows users to gain a network of friends, post profiles, blog, form groups, and exchange music and videos.
Facebook – founded by Americans Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes and Brazilian Eduardo Saverin in 2004. It allows users to “friend” other people, exchange messages, organize events, post information, and join groups.
Reddit – founded by Americans Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. It allows users to submit content with a bulletin board format, in which users vote to determine the organization of the posts.
Twitter – founded by Americans Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and “Biz” Stone in 2006.
Tumblr – founded by American David Karp in 2007. It allows users to post content to a short-form blog, which can be followed by other users.
WhatsApp – founded by American Brian Acton and Ukrainian-American Jan Koum. It allows users to send text messages, images, video, audio, and location information on smartphones.
Snapchat – founded by Americans Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in 2011. It allows users to send videos, photos, text, and drawings to a controlled list of recipients.
After the successful raid that killed Osama bin-Laden, the White House released a photo of the scene in the Situation Room during the raid. The raid was planned over a period of several months, during which the President was involved in the details of the raid.
According to counterterrorism chief John Brennan, “The president had to look at all the different scenarios, all the different contingencies that are out there,” he said.
In times of domestic crisis, U.S. leaders often make public visits to the stricken area to show personal concern for the affected people and to depict themselves as someone who leads from the front.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, President Bush was criticized for his slow response to the storm. Rather than landing in New Orleans to look at the devastation from the ground, he viewed the damage from the air on the way from California to Washington. Many analysts criticized his leadership for failing to survey the damage on the ground.
In contrast, after Hurricane Sandy struck New York and New Jersey in 2012, Obama quickly visited the affected areas multiple times to meet with local leaders and affected families. President Obama was praised for working with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican who in the past has been extremely critical of Obama’s leadership.
Obama’s rapid response and both leaders’ willingness to put aside partisanship was put forward as an example of effective leadership at both the national and state level.
In the U.S. business environment, managers expect to be kept informed of even small developments in projects under their supervision. In practice this means that managers are often cc’ed on routine emails relating to the „nuts and bolts“ of a project, even if the content of the email does not require input from the manager. This practice is done to ensure that the manager has situational awareness of his team members’ work.
Management by walking around (MBWA) was an idea made popular by the 1982 book „In Search of Excellence“ (Tom Peters, Robert Waterman) emphasizing the need for senior-level management get back in touch, or to be in closer touch, with their organizations.
MBWA recommended unscheduled visits by managers to their teams, in their operations, in order to ask questions, offer support, and to answer questions „at the ground level.“
Although thought by many readers of the book to be something new, MBWA, like so many other business management fads in the U.S., has been practiced by Americans in leadership positions for many generations.