Comment by holoduke
7 hours ago
I recently saw a group of automakers together during an event. The contrast between Chinese and Germans was bizare. The group of german automakers were older men in black suits all wearing badge with titles like Senior Executive Sales blablabla. Whereas the Chinese were all young people wearing causual clothing and much more engineering minded. No wonder why european auto makers are doing so badly. They forgot to please people. The only know how to please their untergang.
This could equally illustrate the difference between long established multi national companies with an overbearing corporate culture vs young upstart companies with a dynamic startup culture.
Yeah, this is just the difference between the "cash cow" and "question mark" companies on the BCG growth-share matrix. The Chinese companies will sooner or later turn into stodgy cash cows themselves.
Yea is there not a saying about when the suits and bean counters take over a company the culture dies?
I know it as "when the Elves leave Middle Earth" from an essay of the same name:
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
I think you two are talking about the same thing. The overbearing corporate culture is the cause of valuing dress formality over performance and dynamicism.
The question is why doesn't Germany have any young upstart auto companies when the US and China do? The question being the rhetorical kind.
Extreme over-regulation/regulatory capture. If you do anything worth doing in Germany and one of the established players doesn't like it, they find some reason to arrest you or raid your company and shut it down. As a result, people are afraid of doing things unless there's an explicit government-approved path to doing that exact thing. You can open a restaurant because there's a process for opening restaurants, but if you want to do something off the beaten path, its a bad idea.
It's not like the US has that many either. It's not the kind of winner-takes-all network effects industry that attracts venture capital outside of the Musk reality distortion field.
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Access to capital, mostly. The US has always been willing to grant hefty amounts of taxpayer money to startups, something culturally foreign to Germany (startups are risky, Germans don't want taxpayer money to be spent on risky adventures that might bring losses) and the US also has dozens of billions of dollars a month in 401k pension savings making their way into the asset markets.
And China, well, it's a dictatorship with effectively unlimited foreign currency reserves. They can do whatever they want.
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