studies Archives - Page 5 of 6 - understand-culture

Fail Fast, Fail Often

“Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere”. By John Donohue. The New Yorker. May 31, 2015.

“Discussions about failure may come more easily in America in part because our businesspeople are so good at it. The failure rate for startups, using a yardstick in which investors lose everything (i.e., all of the company’s assets are liquidated), is between thirty and forty per cent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

The rate is seventy to eighty per cent if failure is defined as not meeting the projected return on investment, and ninety to ninety-five per cent if it is measured by failing to beat a declared projection.

Despite these statistics, Americans remain remarkably optimistic about the process—last year, venture-capital companies staked forty-eight billion dollars in pursuit of big returns. And the fact that these investments are concentrated in a relatively small number of companies has not seemed to inspire much fear in prospective entrepreneurs.

According to a study done by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a project run by Babson College and the London Business School, in 2014 among respondents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four who were not already running their own businesses, just thirty per cent reported that fear of failure would stop them from starting one.

And more than half of those Americans surveyed believed that there are good opportunities to strike out on one’s own.

Women’s Clothing Sizes

Modern standard sizes for women’s clothing first began in the 1940s in the U.S. However, women preferred smaller sizes, so over the course of the next several decades, the fashion industry began downsizing its sizes, so that a 16 in the 1940s was a 12 in the 1960s and a 6 in recent times.

Thanks to this downsizing there is also a large discrepancy between American and European sizes – an American size 10 is equivalent to a British 14.

Common and Unoriginal

According to Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, authors of the book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, American culture is solidarity-based – which means that it is based on creating a sense of equality and belonging. It is because of this that Americans seek to find a way to compliment each other for very basic things – to form bonds and a sense of belonging.

Additionally, in 1981, Nessa Wolfson published a study on the use of compliments in various cultures, and her assessment of American complimenting culture, where compliments are “as cheap as chips,” was that “the most striking feature of compliments in American English is their total lack of originality.”

Wolfson wrote that 23% of American compliments include the word “nice,” 20% include “good,” and 54% follow the pattern: “noun/phrase is/looks (really) adjective.”

Popup surveys

A Call Center sends an email to a customer they just served, asking for quick feedback on that service. Websites have popups which give users a chance to respond immediately to what they like and don‘t like. Social networking sites like Facebook have their little thumbs up and down symbols on every page.

Political parties, as well as companies, are constantly asking voters, or consumers, what they like, don‘t like, how they feel, what‘s good bad, up down, right wrong, left right. Marketing in America is too a large degree understood as finding out what people want.

Americans selling something – products, services, political messages – want to know as much as they can about their target groups. Target. It‘s a sign of American customer-orientation. Or, from the perspective of other cultures, customer overorientation.

It is also a sign for the very strong inclination of Americans to quantify human behavior, to use statistics and measurements in order to understand it. Finally, it is a sign of how much Americans value, or take seriously, unreflected impressions and opinions given just after someone has experienced a product, service or an interaction.

Court Case Duration

Court cases in German can last between 4 and 24 months, some as long as 36 months. A recent law allows the parties in a court case to demand that the court system speed up its proceedings.

German companies promise their employees that internal conflicts will be moderated and resolved within two months. If no resolution is found, the conflict parties have the right to escalate their case to the next level of management.

Strengthen their bond

hralliancedc(dot)org. January 21, 2015. A blogpost: Feedback: Its All Personal and Why That Matters.

Performance Reviews. “There aren’t many scheduled professional activities that can generate such an array of feelings for managers and employees alike…. Regardless of how one feels prior to and after receiving feedback, one thing is certain: Feedback is always personal.

Conventional wisdom and typical management training try to remove the personal aspect of feedback, even encouraging us to not take feedback personally. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Done well, the performance review is an opportunity for the manager and the employee to strengthen their bond, to commit to working on themselves individually and together, to continue to strive toward desired results.

Land of Lawyers

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

Shake up Harmony

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.

New car shoppers

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.

Used cars

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.