Philadelphia. Early October. Indian Summer. The days are still long and warm. The foliage green and heavy. It will be a few more weeks before the landscape turns radiant yellow, orange, red, soft light brown. The transition of the seasons has me thinking of the past. It‘s Saturday and I leaf through the Philadelphia Inquirer [...]

Under the title “German Industries Rebuke Chancellor: As Polls Slide, Merkel‘s Coalition Risks Alienating a Longtime Ally Over Taxes” the Wall Street Journal‘s Vanessa Fuhrmans (with contribution from Andrea Thomas) write today that „Germany’s ruling center-right coalition, struggling to reverse its declining approval ratings, is losing support from one of its traditional constituencies—big business.“
Seldom in [...]

See the New York Times front-page article today entitled Bringing Up a Bilingual Child, With Help from the Baby-Sitter addressing the importance of Americans learning a second, perhaps a third language.
A dilemma. Yes, learning a foreign language is critical to understanding another part of the world. As a country with great influence, and great responsibilities, [...]

An Aufruhr (uproar) in Germany. Google Street View. Cars with cameras mounted on their roof trolling the streets of Germans cities, towns and villages. Click. Germans are very sensitive when it comes to Datenschutz (privacy of information). It partly has to do with 1933-45, when the National Socialists ran the place. Bad experience. The state [...]

McChrystal, his staff, their comments in Rolling Stone. Obama dismisses McChrystal. Few of us are experts, can pass judgement. However, three issues were involved.
First. Maintaining team-cohesion. McChrystal was a member of a team, including Secretary of Defense Gates, Secretary of State Clinton, National Security Advisor Jones, Ambassador Eikenberry, and Special Envoy Holbrooke, and more than [...]

It was a Monday. Six in the evening. Early June. I had a few minutes before going across the street to the university to teach. Sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in a multi-level bookstore here in Bonn, I check emails. Germans have an intimate relationship with books, the written, the learned word. Gutenberg. [...]

May 1981. Graduation week at Georgetown. Friends heading off to medical school, law school, banks in New York. Others seemed to have some kind of a plan. I had done little thinking about it. Then my mother: „Go to Germany!“ Why not? I had studied History, mostly European. A two-semester survey course on German History [...]

I, an American, born 1959. One of six. Girl, then five boys. Roman Catholic. Suburban Philadelphia. My father was a business consultant. Studied psychology at Amherst. Then in personnel for Campbell Soups in Camden, New Jersey. Solved an internal materials handling and logistics problem. Became a business consultant. My mother. Studied History in college, then [...]

Success Factor: Germans consider processes key to the success of a company. Americans would cite other factors. More relevant than how the work is done is what the concrete results are.