Making cultural peace with the Germans

The dichotomy of the focus only on quality, as positive as it is, versus innovation can make a German company run into problems when acting globally. Enforcing high standards of technology to your divisions in other countries and not backing them with costs, will end up in huge management discussions concerning, for example, how long a desktop should last, or is it best to use less costly equipment. This leads to a halt in productivity.

On the other side of the coin, to allow people to spend money trying to improve the last 20 percent of a product which is not perfect leads to time consumption that yields little of no value.

It’s a tough thing to convince my German colleagues that the perfect solution for a global company will never be found, and that balance of good enough and continuous improvement is the right direction. In the US we tended to throw something in, start working with it, pick out what’s wrong and gain benefits at an early stage.

Conversely, our German users have to wait for a year instead for a solution because they spend so much time upfront trying to make the 100 percent solution. I remember one employee responsible for the "client" build decided to leave the company, because as he put it "I cannot build a 80%". A 100 percent solution may be laudable, but as an American I do not see advantage alone in this way of thinking. Getting it perfect before you present it could actually hinder a company from staying in the lead in the global market. It would be like developing the best car in the world and releasing years after others have put five thousand models on the streets already. Quality vs. Time to market must be balanced.

Building up real global teams

Within our company we have bridged this cultural gap by building up real global teams within infrastructure leveraging each other’s cultural differences with a German, Asian, & American teams and global thinking and acting managers possessing excellent technical skills who can leverage the strengths and weaknesses to balance each other we have been able to implement projects at a extremely high pace.