(Quite probably OT)
I think it’s bureaucracy, not culture.
Germany the culture probably produces more innovators per capita than America,
but the German business world doesn’t know what to do with them.
German high school students seem to be a few years ahead of their American
peers, as the American system has comparatively little tracking, and too much
repetition. American sixth grade math is, as Russ Roberts likes to remind us,
“a review year”. German college grads appear to be yet another year ahead, as
the German universities concentrate on the subject at hand.
The problem comes if you want to change. Germany has a first rate system, but
no second chances. If you didn’t get into Gymnasium as a young child, if you
picked the wrong degree program at teenager, it’s incredibly difficult to
change tracks in the large German companies/public institutions.
American institutions, especially public institutions, often seem second rate
compared to their German peers. They are saved only by giving second chances.
You can change your career, go back to school, lateral into a different line of
work, drop out of college and get your startup funded.
I’ve had two reasonably successful careers - one as a college dropout, and the
other totally unrelated to my eventual degree.
I’ve lived in Germany, I like Germany quite a lot, but there’s no place for
people like me there.
Ideally we would have the efficiency of the German system, and the flexibility
of the American one.
On Mar 6, 2021, at 11:52 AM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Possibly also more of a cultural bias toward structure and hierarchy, rather
than ad-hoc setup for every project. I have a dim memory of an old German
assessment of the US Army, which said roughly: "they are amazingly good at
improvising; what's less impressive is that they *must* improvise so much,
because they do so little planning and organizing ahead of time..."
(The downside of this is rigidity. My old boss of many years ago came over
from Germany after the war, looking for a chance to run his own shop,
escaping the expectation that he would naturally have to spend many years as
an underling first...)
That said, yes, also more weight on analytics vs try out. Charles Steinmetz,
the grand high wizard of heavy electrical machinery in the early 20th
century, was a German immigrant to the US. He was the first to apply serious
mathematical analysis to electric motors and such -- he coined the word
"hysteresis" among other things -- at a time when nobody took that idea
seriously, and it revolutionized electrical machinery. (The little motor
company he worked for got such conspicuously superior results that GE tried
hard to hire him away. When this failed -- he was loyal to the man who'd
given him a job when he was a penniless immigrant and needed one badly -- GE
gritted its teeth and bought the whole company to acquire him.)
Henry