According to a recent survey, approximately 64% of American parents want their children to grow up to be lawyers. As a result, from a young age American children are taught to admire people who are skilled at presenting cases and winning arguments.
So much so that lawyer is the 14th most common answer that American children give to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lawyers defend their clients, especially in hearings
In 2013 J.D. Power and Associates conducted a study to determine what factors influence Americans when purchasing vehicles. According to the report, the primary reason why shoppers avoid hybrids and electric vehicles is cost/price. Furthermore, gas mileage is the most influential factor in the decision process, and has been since a rise in gas prices in 2008.
One of the less important factors that Americans consider is reliability, with only 17% of new vehicle shoppers avoiding models with poor reputations for reliability. In fact, Americans put more importance on things like design and appearance than on reliability, with 33% of new vehicle shoppers avoiding models based on their exterior design.
Wall Street Journal, February 2014. “The High Cost of Avoiding Conflict at Work.” Joann S. Lublin
David Dotlich, a leadership and succession coach, has identified eagerness to please as one of the top reasons that executives fail.
Keen to innovate faster, employers increasingly choose bosses astute at dealing with conflict rather than ducking it, says Judith Glaser, an executive coach and author of the new book, Conversational Intelligence.
It’s not that firms want contentious leaders, but those who retreat from confrontation tend to postpone hard decisions and allow problems to fester, according to Ms. Glaser.
And with more businesses relying on teamwork, top managers’ conflict-resolution skills are in greater demand, adds Theodore Dysart, a vice chairman of Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., a major executive-recruitment firm.
Southwest Airlines Co. leaders wanted to shake up what they viewed as a culture of artificial harmony among staffers. The company now promotes middle managers to executive positions partly based on their ability to spark conflict among staffers.
According to DEKRA’s 2014 report German automobiles scored very highly in terms of reliability, ranking first in six of nine categories.
The overall winner was the Mercedes E-Class, followed by the Audi Q5 and the Audi A5. Car of the Year was the Mercedes B-Class. As reported by the Kölner Stadtanzeiger on February 19, 2014.
Reliability is in Germany one of the essential characteristics of any product, and at the same time a key element of the German brand.
Business has long been a cornerstone of American culture. The American Dream is typically associated with the ability to start with almost nothing, and through the virtues of business, to rise to great wealth and social stature.
Although the U.S. is no longer the country with the largest rate of social mobility in the world Americans still hold business savvy and an ability to rise in social stature in high prestige.
The most popular major for American university students is business, with approximately 22% of graduates. Science and engineering are the least popular majors, with approximately 5% of American students choosing engineering, and only 1.4% choosing physical sciences.
As a result of this business prestige, in every American engineer you’ll find a businessperson – someone who’s always looking to get the best for less, and will never consider quality without also considering the cost necessary to achieve it.
In 2011 PwC presented the results of its study Zukunftsthema Prozessmanagement – literally Future Topic Process Management, which surveyed its current state in German companies.
95% of executive management in Germany agreed that business process management was either important or very important to their success. Process management has become a critical function at the corporate level.
At the same time only 5% of those surveyed said that their process management was well developed. 46% of the companies did not have a clear plan on how to react to process deviation. Only 12% claimed to have an established mechanism for handling deviation from the most critical internal business processes.
While the study documents how much room for improvement there is in the area of process management governance, it was equally clear how flexibly German companies react to process deviation. Which, in turn, contradicts the cliché that Germans have a process for everything and always stick to the process.
In 2010 the online-career portal monster.de conducted a study regarding German behavior in social online networks. 61% of people said that they are not friends with their colleagues via social media.
Only 27% indicated that they talk to their colleagues on Facebook. 12% of the survey participants are friends with their colleagues on Facebook. However, most have different profile settings for colleagues. The survey results suggest that Germans separate their private life and their professional life.
Towards the end of 2014, the German Postbank conducted a study with the goal of identifying the good policies which Germans enforce with regard to their financial matters. The results were summarized in article titled When it comes to money, Germans are bureaucrats who are afraid to take risks:
“Like a pillar of economic wisdom, the desire to have a higher income looms above all other factors. The remaining results are actually more reflective of the ‘financial illiteracy’, which the Germans are already often credited with.
In this way, the study exposed the citizens as being fearful bureaucrats, who above all just want to increase their personal wealth through taxation, saving, and maintaining better control of their finances, rather than earn money through smart investing, or saving for retirement.”
Risikoscheu – A fear of risks: The attribute of a decision-maker to prefer the path of lesser risk – and thereby most minimal loss – when confronted with several alternatives which have an equal anticipated gain. This may mean waiting longer for the same reward, or even settling for a lesser gain, if the chances are greater that it will be received.
In the most recent poll on occupational prestige in Germany conducted by the Allensbach Institute engineers and university professors took seventh place, behind physicians and craftsmen, but well ahead of politicians and journalists.
26% of Germans polled noted a high degree of respect for the engineering profession. No wonder, for Germans define individual prestige based on technical (specialized) knowledge.
Almost every third supervisory board member of a DAX30 company is an engineer by training. Industrial heavyweights like Volkswagen and DaimlerBenz have always been run by engineers, to the dismay, as the magazine Spiegel wrote, of those colleagues with a business or legal background.
The Germans value being self-critical. Inflated, positive feedback threatens self-critique, threatens one‘s ability to identify and learn from mistakes and weaknesses. Germans prefer that their work results speak for themself. They value the quiet, focused worker who is not easily distracted by comments about their performance.
Studies, though, document that this ideal is not always in the best interest of employees and their companies. More than half of all German managers and subject-area experts feel that they deserve more praise. Only a quarter are satisfied with the current level of positive feedback. 14% responded that they receive no praise at all for their work. Only 3% stated that they need any additional praise.