10 Jahre IT bei Heidelberger Druckmaschinen
Making cultural peace with the Germans
Foto: clearlens – Fotolia.com
However, ten years later, I have come to appreciate the differences. No one would argue that we certainly see the offspring of method and process in the hundreds of German companies producing top quality. Who doesn’t know the time proven quality of a Volkswagen, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes. SAPSAP, the market and tech leader of business software and, of course our own printing presses from Heidelberg. Quality is number one in all aspects of the product and consumer experience. Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de
Thus, my challenge over the past ten years has been the 80/20 rule - to bring together both cultures of managing IT - the quality thinking of a German company, the leanness of an Asian company and the American ability to quickly find solutions meshing them into successful collaboration.
Vier Tipps - Das Beste aus beiden Welten vereinen
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1. Allow different styles and approaches to the business. It is the only way to success when you lead a global company. 2.Build up multicultural teams to combine the technical and management strengths from different cultures. It will help you make quicker decisions and quickly meet business needs araound the world. 3. Encourage your developers to build solutions that are not perfect, but good enough and fit for the market. It is no use to develop the best car in the world and release years after others have put five thousand models on the street already. 4. Ask yourself: When is the IT infrastructure getting too perfect without adding more value? Do you really need to replace it every three or five years?. |
Flash back again to my arrival in 2000. One cultural difference I found was that as in America where new technologies and being "tech savvy" were embraced by the general public, even if only from a conceptual point of view, people in Germany were either more reluctant or weren’t given the opportunity to try out new "tech toys" in everyday life.
This apprehension often extended to business world as well. I would say that US businesses were more eager to try new technology with the general optimistic view that if there were cost savings involved it was worth a try. In Germany I was usually faced with the opposite. From their point of view, cost was only one aspect of the total process and savings doesn’t always equal value to tried and proven ways of doing things. This scepticism was often seen within the top-level management of German companies, it is better to spend more and do it right than to jump on new technology that has not been proven.
The key question, I was always asking, was: When is the IT infrastructure getting too perfect without adding more value to the business?