Cultural Differences in Business Life. Understanding German and American Business Culture

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing grade: 13 http: //uni-jena.de/ (Philosphische Fakultät - Lehrstuhl Interkulturelle Wirtschaftskommunikation) course: Interkulturseminar USA-Deutschland language: English abstract: Globalization has led to remarkable changes in the way we conduct the world''s business. International Mergers and acquisitions are en vogue today. The advantages quoted by managers include advantages of scale increased shareholder value access to new markets lower overheads and so on. The number of international mergers and acquisitions between German and American companies increased a lot during the last years as well. At the beginning there are high hopes and elation connected with the deal. But the long-term reality however is much the opposite. At least 50 percent of all international mergers and acquisition activity fails no matter how the success is measured. There are also lots of companies who failed who are therefore not able to benefit from some positive synergy effects like cost reductions. Why did that happen? A survey tried to analyze the reasons for this. The surprising result was that just 30% of the failures were attributed to the hard factors of business like planning finance or technology. For the rest the reason lay in the so-called soft factors which contain cultural and organizational behaviour. Somewhat less acknowledged although hardly disputed is the positive and negative impact of cultural aspects on the success of M&A activity. The following work reveals the differences between American and German business culture and also analyzes its historical and social background. Thereby the main goal is to disprove that American and German business styles are almost similar. Furthermore at the end the reader should know more about the existing differences between the two nations because their unawareness leads to the failures