tj444
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SilverMark
In almost every article I read, the comparison to the success of the German Industrial model as a way of getting past the malaise of our economic downturn. I keep looking at the different descriptions of it, how it works, where it falls short and all. I have not formed an opinion as of yet, those who are more familiar with it, share your opinions.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2072381-2,00.html
One of many articles referencing the German methods.
Yeah, what the US is doing isnt working very well.
I dont know much about the German model, I know they are very into solar power but I have not researched the topic yet to find out what they have done to encourage that.
They seem to value a workers state of mind and seem to know that they need a way to beat the stress. So a worker can go to the spa, a couple of times a year and its part of the medical system so no cost to the worker. (gasp!) I wonder tho, about unions in Germany, how they are viewed there, how they function, etc and the differences between there and the US. Imo, unions can do too much damage to businesses and the public sector when they have too much power.
I remember when people were looking at how the Japanese did business, a bunch of books came out, some companies tried a few things, I dont know how successful that was but you dont hear much about that anymore. I think each country has a different state of mind which permeates society and the work ethic, and that cant be imported easily or at all. Jmo. I remember going on a trip to Germany and watching tv, and they had long commercials at the end of the shows. I asked why they watched the commercials and was told (basically) from what i recall, that the ads paid for the shows so it was their duty to watch the ads. Very odd, huh?
I like Zakaria, I used to watch him when I had a tv (I moved here to Socal and never got around to buying another tv yet). Did you catch his program on CNN a few weeks ago?- Restoring the American Dream: How to Innovate- I did catch a blurb on Google when i was at the gym one day, this is what struck me (20% time)-
"SCHMIDT: The people who are very, very creative are not going to show up at 9:00, leave at 5:00 and punch a card. They're going to be interesting. They're going to be fun. They're going to be fun- loving, want to have free food, all the benefits of Google were fundamentally decided very early on so that people were working with each other and were creative.
And people were encouraged to make the most outlandish ideas. Could we try this? Could we try that? And so forth. And those people are now running the company.
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Google's top brass came up with a set of innovation principles, one of which says employees have a license to pursue their dreams. As company policy, every Google engineer spends 20 percent of his time working on any project he or she wants. A concept they call 20 percent time.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCHMIDT: If you look back, most of the really interesting products that have come out of Google have come out of the 20 percent time where somebody starts something, he gets excited about it.
(END OF VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: One example. After September 11th, 2001 one Googler was visiting a bunch of different news sites every day to read about the attacks. He thought to himself, why don't I write a computer program that will search all of these sites for me? He used his 20 percent time to write the program.
And soon Google News was born. A Web tool that searches the site for particular news stories. Google News now accounts for 30 percent of all traffic to new sites on the Web."
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