USA-DE-SUCCESS
The USA-DE-SUCCESS podcast is hosted by Kelly Nadjimi and Daniel Donahey. It exists to help Germans and Americans do better business together by learning how to work more harmoniously, successfully and efficiently. Our guests will learn how to employ proven best practices and avoid common and costly traps, all while profiting from the practical insights, shortcuts and secrets gained in over 30 years of German-American Cross-Cultural Business Training.
USA-DE-SUCCESS
German-American Cross-Cultural Business Training, Season 1, Episode 1
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German-American cross-cultural business is practically always a challenge, It is characterized by frequent misunderstandings, conflicts, escalations, missed forecasts and disappointments, BUT WHY? Most reasonable people would assume that Germans and Americans should be able to work together with no undue difficulties. However, the reality of the situation is much different. German-American business is usually beset with underperformance and far too many outright failures. In this episode, Kelly Nadjimi and Daniel Donahey discuss how culture affects business generally, and specifically, why Germans and Americans so often find it difficult to work together harmoniously, successfully and efficiently. This is a MUST SEE for anyone engaged in a German-American business relationship. Leaders, especially, should learn the lessons offered here.
Well, hello there. Hello and welcome.
SPEAKER_02Hi, would like to welcome you very warmly to our brand new podcast, German American Cross-Cultural Business Training.
SPEAKER_00I'm Daniel Donahey.
SPEAKER_02And I'm Kelly Najini.
SPEAKER_00And this is episode one of the very first season of our brand new podcast. And we're here to help Germans and Americans work together better, more successfully, and to help them succeed where so many others have failed in the past. And we're very committed to making that happen.
SPEAKER_02Yes, we absolutely are. So let's get right to it.
SPEAKER_00Sounds good to me.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so why don't we start with this? You've been in the German American cross-cultural training business for a very long time, haven't you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I have uh about 35 years in the meantime, quite a while.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's a long time, I guess. But why is that? Um, it seems like Germans and Americans should be able to work together just fine. So if we don't, it would help to know why.
SPEAKER_00Well, you would think so, you know, the way I always like to express it is people are people. And although every individual is a culture of one, everybody has his or her own experience and background and family and friends and education and problems or whatever the case may be. That said, although everybody is a culture of one, most people are the same in another way. Uh, we're all trying to reach the same goals in life, more or less, you know, have similar desires and are dealing with similar challenges and problems, like to do the same kinds of good things for our families. So we're similar in that way. And I don't think that German American issues at work have anything to do with the people. German people are people, American people are people, but people operate within cultural systems, and that's very true and doubly true in business. And cultural systems are something entirely different.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so um that's very interesting. You've talked about um culture. So could you define culture? So what really is it and why do we even have culture? Why do we even have it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, I I'd be glad to uh as long as you'll allow, I'll load up a couple of slides. Okay, very good. It'll just take a second to get that going and we'll go from there then.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00All right, the slides should be there now. Do you see those, Kelly?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I can see them.
SPEAKER_00All right, very good. Let's go to the first one, uh, which actually has your questions here. What is culture and why does it even exist? Well, to understand that, uh, and after doing this for a long, long time, I I like to take a simple explanation. I like to say that culture is a story. And uh actually, there's a lot of support for that point of view. Social scientists call the cultural story a cultural narrative. And if you think about it, what is a narrative? It's just a story that somebody tells you. So the cultural narrative uh exists in every cultural group, and the reason we have it is that it gives us a survival advantage. And it turns out that people who are members of groups live longer and better lives than people who are out there trying to survive on their own. And and uh so culture has one main job in life, and it's to help the members of the group uh it represents to survive and thrive uh in life. And the cultural story, the cultural narrative, better said, is essentially like a library of a culture. Everything that people in that cultural group have learned to survive and thrive throughout the history of it is included in some way within that cultural story. Uh sometimes it's uh it's expressed to the people in stories, children's stories, expressions, uh things like that. But what the cultural story does for people is that it helps us recognize other members of our cultural group. That's where the big survival advantage comes from, because when you recognize another member of your group, you're more likely to cooperate with that person, to share resources with that person, uh, perhaps participate in a common defense should that be necessary, and so forth. And like I said, the vehicles for uh disseminating the cultural story, there there's many things you may uh know that it people who grew up in the United States, probably the first expression any American child ever learns is if at first you don't succeed, try try again. So, you know, that's the first one every kid learns in America, and and what that tells every American child is it's not necessary to get it right the first time. Yeah, you if you don't get it right the first time, try a second time, try a third time. It doesn't matter whether you do it right the first time. By the way, the first uh childhood story that most kids in America learn is called the little train that could. It's about a little train trying to c climb a high mountain, and he takes a run at the mountain. I think I can, I think I can, I think, but he doesn't make it and he rolls back. So he takes another run at the mountain, I think I can, I think I can, and he rolls back and he keeps going until he gets over the mountain. Then he says, I did. The the little train who could uh put Obama probably in the presidency 20 years before he was really prepared for the job because every American has such a deep connection to that. Of course, if at first you don't succeed, try try again. That's a story that's fairly specific to uh the American tradition. If you think about the German tradition, there's not really one that uh uh corresponds to that very closely. German stories exist uh in mass for sure, but there's not one like that really, because for reasons, yeah, sure. For reasons we'll look at maybe on the next slide, it wouldn't fit culturally in in the survival uh the survival advantage, the ability for germ people in the German cultural group to uh survive and thrive, that story doesn't make a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think our stories are a little different.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely they are, yeah. They absolutely are now uh culture because of its survival job, because the reason we have it is to survive and thrive, it's biological, so it's built into us. We all have a need for culture. I don't care who you are, you've got that need. Part of that is expressed as a need for belonging, which is maybe higher or or lowered depending on which group you belong to, but everybody has it, so it is biological, but it's probably pragmatic as well, because because of the uh survival job that culture and the cultural story must do, you can't separate the cultural story from what it takes to survive and thrive for members of that cultural group. I always like to use the example if you were looking at a group, uh let's say a group that's based in the heart of the desert, uh that they would certainly have a different cultural story that have different priorities and values, especially dealing with water and things like that, than you would find in a cultural group that was uh living along the banks of a of a river. Yeah, so it's logical. Yeah, yeah, it'd be it would be strange if it weren't that way. And that's why stereotypes and things like that make no sense in a way. People will act the way people act depending on what they have to do to survive and thrive. So uh that that's all that is, it's nothing more than that. And I'd like you to have a look, if you would, at this atlas of the world or this, you know, picture of an atlas of the world, better said. It's obvious Germany's in the middle of the world and it's green. You can also see that there's a difference in the size of the two countries.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00Now I'll come back to that difference. Yeah, very big difference. I'll come back to that difference in a moment. I want to add a couple of sentences to our conversation, and then I'll return to that atlas because it makes a lot more sense once I've done this. Now, one thing about Germany uh that you may or may not be aware of, Germany is roughly the size of the state of Oregon. And in Oregon, you've got 4.26 million people who live there. In Germany, you've got 85 million people who share that space. So the population density in Germany compared to the United States is off the charts. Now, forget Oregon. If you go country to country, just uh Germany to the United States, the population density in Germany is a little more than seven times higher than it is in the United States. And that leads Germans to a conclusion, and it's a logical and a correct conclusion that resources are scarce throughout German history. They have been. Uh, you've got a lot more people who need those resources than you have resources for the people. So it's a simple fact. Population density is much higher, uh, and those people are condensed in a much smaller space. Now, because of that, survival in Germany's always been linked, and the cultural system's always been grounded in ensuring the need for security.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And the most important things in ensuring the need for security are stability, predictability, and efficiency. Efficiency, especially in the way Germans use their resources. So let's go back to the story again from the American kids. If at first you don't succeed, try try again. That story wouldn't make a lot of sense in Germany, because in Germany, kids have to learn to do it right the first time.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because if they don't, they're wasting resources, and wasting resources is something that Germans don't see fondly because that actually violates the survival principle. So because it is that way, Germans will also have an eye on that, and and they'll feel like it's their business to comment on it if somebody is doing something that's wasteful of resources. Now, if we go back over to the uh US side, the American side, you'll see that the land mass of the United States is protected by two oceans, always has been. That's less relevant today than it was throughout our history, but the cultural story evolves through the history. So the fact that uh America is protected by two oceans has always been important, has an immense size thing. You could put uh Germany three or four times into Texas and eight times into Alaska or something. And and so you you've got an immense size, abundant resources, abundant resources of any resource you want to name, pretty much. And and survival for that, and the population density, by the way, is relatively low by comparison. Uh it's it's not high population density in the United States. You it will you'll see a high population density in city like New York or LA, Chicago, whatever, but throughout the United States, yeah, it's it's it's much lower. So survival in the U.S. has never been linked to uh uh efficient use of our resources. Uh, we have another challenge that we have to deal with. Uh America has always been multicultural, and the United States of America has been multicultural since the very first day. It was multicultural before the very first day of the USA. And and that creates a whole different kind of challenge. And what that has resulted in for Americans is we've had to build our cultural system around meeting the need for respect. People from vastly different backgrounds have to be able to come in there, get along together, cooperate together, and and perform together. They have to get along. And so respect has always been the core of the American cultural system, and the guaranteer of respect is cooperation, or the way the Americans like to talk about it is alignment. Alignment means being flexible in your cooperation, adjusting to each other. Problem with alignment is that it's the opposite of efficiency.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if you're going to practice alignment, you're going to lose some efficiency. There's no way you that doesn't happen. You can imagine I've got two trouser pockets here, and one is filled with alignment, and the other is filled with efficiency. Everything in the alignment pocket came out of the efficiency pocket. They're opposites, truly. Security and respect, they're not opposites, but they compete. There are things that uh Germans do to meet their need for security, for example, being literal in their communication.
SPEAKER_02So Germans I think we are very literal, very direct.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, literal and direct, and that serves those needs, both security and efficiency. But Americans tend to look at literal direct communication often as being disrespectful. And Americans, in their desire to be respectful in our communication, we don't communicate literally in a normal case. There are times if you get us angry that we do. But if we're not angry, we don't uh communicate normally in a literal way, and our communication is indirect on anything that might be seen as negative. So a classic example uh that I like to use in my seminars is let's say as an American, I go to a German colleague and say, I have this great idea, and I'd I'd I'd like to do this, and it would bring us these fantastic benefits. I can almost guarantee that the answer will be no, this is impossible. There's very many reasons for that. The biggest one being there's a difference in how Germans plan and make decisions because of the cultural differences. That's the biggest one. Uh, the second one is you know, it's already been done. Uh we've already made the decision, the plan's been made. So uh changing something once you've already started is not that easy. Fine and good. But if you say to an American, no, this is impossible, the translation isn't this is impossible, uh, because in the American system we don't believe in impossible. The worst case scenario is you don't know how to do it yet.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, impossible. And I think the the German perspective is I'm just, you know, you're going to waste time and money. Exactly. We already know it's not going to work just exactly.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. That's exactly it. And and that for very good reasons. But again, for the Americans, that's a very disrespectful way to look at it because what that means to me is that person doesn't even have enough respect for me to consider it. Not even going to try. So what happens on my end is I'm going to start looking at that person now no longer as a friend, but now as an enemy. And that changes everything. Let's go the other way, though. Let's say a German colleague comes to me and says, Daniel, I've got this great idea, and it will get us to these benefits and help us avoid these problems. And I know for some reason that the answer is no. My answer to that person will be, oh, that's a very interesting idea. We'll consider it carefully. So you can see the problem. That German person now goes back to Germany believing we've practically got a yes, not quite a yes, but practically got a yes, starts making plans and doing what's necessary, telling people he or she already got a yes or close to it, and then finds out in three or four weeks that the answer was really a no. And that person's gonna be angry now because he or she's going to feel like I was misled, I was deceived. Why weren't they honest about it?
SPEAKER_02Right, they weren't honest.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_02That would be if what I would think, I guess, like why didn't they just say no?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so if you were part of the American cultural tradition, when you heard that, that's a very interesting idea. We'll consider it carefully. You know immediately that's a hard no. And if if if you were on the other side part of the uh German cultural tradition, and somebody said no, this is impossible, you would know why. You would know because that decision's already been made, the plan's already been made, the resources dedicated, so it's a no, it's just but you see, those things don't mix very well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's just very different, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely it is. So security uh and respect, they compete, they're not opposites, but they compete. Efficiency and alignment are opposites, and that's the core dilemma that Americans and Germans have to uh manage successfully before we can get good outcomes together. Now we can get uh good outcomes together, in fact, very good outcomes together if we do manage that well. But most of the time it isn't managed well, but probably because of the similarities in the cultural systems. You know, uh I didn't mention this, I don't believe, but uh 51% of Americans are of uh German descendancy, at least on one side of the family. So German is the largest cultural group in America, and many, many Americans have real proper German names and they think of themselves as German. Obviously, they're not, whether they think of that way themselves that way or not. But but because we look so similar and things appear to be so similar, people tend to underestimate how big those cultural differences are. Now, truth be told, there's a lot of overlap between German and American culture, no doubt about it, but there's also a lot that doesn't overlap where we lie outside of each other, and that's usually right there where we try to do business together. And where we do have differences, they're massive differences. We're not talking about little differences, we're talking about massive differences. You can't really get that far apart from each other or much further apart from each other, and still belong to the human species on some of those things, so it's a lot different than most people think. Of course, that's only a handful of things, but that handful of things are exactly the handful of things that keep sabotaging what we're trying to do together. Now, uh let me show you something here. I mentioned early on that culture is a system, and I wanted to kind of connect the dots on that point a little bit uh before we get too far today. So culture is a story, the cultural narrative, however, gives us a simp a system that we must understand in order to be, let's say, full members of our cultural group. And already, based on what we've talked about uh in this episode so far, it's clear that if I do the things that are demanded of me in the American cultural system and you do the things that are demanded of you in the German cultural system, there are going to be some mismatches. It's it's just it's going to happen. There's no way it can't happen. So let's think about this. Most cultural issues that people run into in business, they're systemic. It's not the individuals, it's not the stereotypes, not that stuff. It's systemic differences causing the trouble. Now, if we go back to the cultural narrative that we all learned growing up, it gives us several things. And among the many things it gives us, there's three that I pay attention to. One of them is a description of the world. Now, the German description of the world and the American description of the world, they're fairly close. There are differences, but they're fairly close. But when you get to the moral compass, they do vary quite a bit. Now, the moral compass tells us what's right and wrong, what's good and bad, what's efficient, what isn't efficient. You can't separate the moral compass from the cultural story, from the idea that resources are scarce or resources are abundant and so forth. So the moral compass, uh, by the way, there's an expression before I forget it. There's an expression that goes culture eats strategy for breakfast. And it comes from an old management guru. His name was Peter Drucker, he's passed away in the meantime, but he went to America ages ago. Uh, he was from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire originally, and he he was a leading management thinker in America until his death in 2006. But one of the expressions he left behind was culture eats strategy for breakfast. And if you want to know why that is, it's pretty simple. You've got to think about strategy. You need intellect to formulate it, you need will to impose it, you need patience to monitor it, you need tenacity to, through the monitoring, improve it and uh impose sanctions when people don't follow it. Long story short, cult uh strategy takes a lot of work. Culture doesn't need any of that, it's always on. It's a filter. Everything you or I or anybody sees in life goes through this cultural filter, and what comes out the back end is meaning. You and I see the same thing, but it's quite possible you extract a much different meaning from it than I do, and how we behave depends on meaning. Yeah, so culture uh uh drives behavior, and make no mistake about it. So you've got the mole uh the moral compass, and the moral compass leads us to a code of conduct. There's a code of the do's and don'ts and the taboos in any culture. There's a code of conduct in Germany, there's another code of conduct in the US. There's plenty of overlap in it, there's also plenty of difference in it. In one culture, a do may be a don't in the other, in the other, uh a don't is uh a do in this one, and a taboo is a do in the other, and and whatever. And that's there's no doubt about that.
SPEAKER_02But it's just something that we learn, right? Well growing up. It's not something that we're maybe aware of all the time. So do you think that's a good thing?
SPEAKER_00Well, you don't even think about it. That's that's the joke. Uh, you've got to think about strategy, but you don't have to think about culture. We don't even know it's operating it, but it's always on, it's always uh uh deriving meaning, it's always telling us the proper way to. Do things now. The code of conduct that you follow is uh closely connected, of course, to the moral compass. And this code of conduct that's where it gets interesting when you're trying to understand where cultural differences come from. Every code of conduct is nothing more than a set of rules, and every rule in that code of conduct is connected to a set of expectations. I like to use the example uh because it's it's such an obvious one uh about respect. You know, Americans demand to be respected, it's the core value in the American cultural tradition. Germans also want to be respected.
SPEAKER_01It's not a good thing.
SPEAKER_00Everyone wants to be respected. Yeah, everybody does. Everybody who doesn't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00In Germany, that's the second highest value, but nonetheless, Germans want to be respected. In fact, if you look at cultural studies, there's not much difference uh between the German need for respect and the American. They're actually pretty close. But if I ask a group of Germans how do you define being respected, they're going to give me a litany of things that don't have really much to do uh with respect. They'll say uh people should say what they mean and do what they say. In other words, be predictable. Uh uh people should keep their word, they should put things in writing, they should take time to read the whole email. The when you go through that whole list of uh expectations that Germans connect to respect, what would it you could summarize it this way? If you respect me, you will meet meet my need for security. That's what it really comes down to. But that's not strange, really, because the core value is security, so it's not unusual that people would also connect their respect definition to that need for security. You go to the American side and it's much different. How do you guys define uh being respected? Well, uh people show their appreciation and gratitude by do something, uh, they praise uh things, especially good things. They give you input and influence over the things that affect you uh directly. Uh they treat each other with generosity and they adapt to each other. So the American definition of respect is very much in line with how Maslov defined the need for esteem, which is synonymous with respect. And it's different to the German point in terms of the expectations. We're using the same word, but that's a whole different set of expectations. Yeah, and they don't have much to do with each other. And the problem is, the cultural problem is I don't understand. Well, maybe I do now, but most Americans don't understand the Germans' expectations concerning respect, nor do the Germans understand the American expectations concerning respect. And we don't understand if we don't understand each other's expectations, we do what we think is right. In other words, I try to show them respect based on what I would do, and they do the same. That's what good people do. You know, uh in some circles you would call that the golden rule. Try to treat people the way you'd like to be treated yourself. Well, that's all fine and good if your expectations are pretty close, but once they lie pretty far apart from each other, that no longer works. If I treat you the way I'd like to be treated, I'm probably exactly disrespecting you by doing the same thing. That's where it gets tricky. And we've got plenty of cases where that's happening in in uh German and American business relationships and so forth. Now, expectations are so important because whether they're met or not determines the level of trust we'll have for each other. If I do something for you and I get in return what I expected, I learn to trust you. And the more I trust you, the more I'm willing to risk on you, you know, the more I'm willing to risk doing. So the last point of this is that trust determines how much advanced payment we're willing to risk. It's a little confusing when I use the term advanced payment because people think automatically of money.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Could theoretically also be money, but it could be many other things too. Could be preparing well, it could be being motivated, it could be as simple as filling out a form, but things you're willing to do before being paid for them because you trust that other person, you believe you'll get in return what you expected. The problem is if you don't get what you expected in return, then the trust dwindles. When the trust dwindles, so does the willingness the next time around to make that advanced payment. And then all of a sudden you have organizations that's they started out pretty well, but every time they meet, every time they do something, uh their willingness to trust and and make advanced payments to each other dwindles and dwindles until they can no longer work together. When when we do the next episode, I'll show you some statistics on that. It's amazing how bad that gets and how quickly it gets bad if if we're not careful. And it's the the sad thing is it's all well-intentioned people, it's not incompetent, it's not a lack of desire. It can get to a lack of desire if you know it can get bad, but it didn't start that way. That is the cultural issue.
SPEAKER_02That's really eye-opening, to be honest. I never really thought about it that way. It's been interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's thanks for explaining. You're very welcome. Let me uh I'm I'm going to click the presentation away and and let's talk a little bit to finish this thing up. Very good. All right, so that's uh all I really have for today. I thought that would be a good starting point for us. And and I was also just talking to you about it. I found you know it was really good to go through it and lay it out like that. What are the highlights you take from that conversation? What what are you going to remember when you leave this episode?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So, first of all, like I said, thank you so much for explaining all of this because to I never really thought about these things. I never really thought that our cultural systems are so different, and the core values of our systems are so different. It's really interesting to look at it that way. Um, so I think that was really really eye-opening to me and um something for me to think about in the future.
SPEAKER_00So that's what I always hope for because the the thing is, once you understand that part, and if you accept that part, by the way, I'll show studies and statistics to back it up as we go, but but once you understand that, then it also makes sense. Okay, there does need to be some adjustment. Yeah, you don't need to become an American, I don't need to become a German to work well together, but there are things we do have to do, right?
SPEAKER_02It's important, I think, to understand. Yeah, absolutely to know why it's not that one is better than the other, it's just different, and expectations are different. So I think that's really important to have in mind when you work with someone like from the US or from Germany, so exactly.
SPEAKER_00So it's not just you must make a change, but rather understand there is a sense to it, there's a good reason uh for it, and you're not the only one. The changes are also uh going on on the other side, or they should be. And then the good news in all of this is that if we well, maybe I'll say the bad news and then the good news. The bad news, if we don't make these cultural adjustments, German American business relationships are going to suffer from underperformance. I mean, that is so widespread that it's epidemic. It's just if you don't make the adjustments, you're going to end up with underperformance and and be disappointed in and not reach what you should be reaching.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But if you do make these cultural adjustments, which are makeable on both sides, the sky is the limit. I can also when we talk next time, I'll give a few examples, but I can give you some examples of companies that were losing billions, went through this process, and now they're among the most successful companies in the world. Because the way I like to finish this uh kind of uh conversation is this success is a choice. It's a choice. It it is easy to succeed, relatively easy anyway, to succeed if we're willing to do what's necessary, and if we're not, you get what you get.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, that's I think I'm very excited to see you next time and to hear about all these things.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for thank you very much very much, and everyone, thank you for watching and listening. And uh, we'll be back again with the next episode in a week. And uh have fun until then and uh choose right. Choose to succeed. Okay, see you in the next one. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Thank you.