The View from Stuttgart – On War

The View from Stuttgart – On War

Unfortunately I have to start this week’s post with an apology. It seems that my glowing report of the ubiquitous WiFi at Stuttgart’s Airport and Exhibition Centre was biased by being a denizen of these parts with Telekom account that gives me automatic access to any of the Telekom hotspots quite apart from what if offered by the Stuttgart-infrastructure more generally. Some colleagues from around the world have since pointed out that this is not quite as smooth as I assumed for all. Rest assured, I will be taking this up with the relevant authorities! However overall the site is impressive and due to become more so with the international rail station coming in 2021 which will further reduce the 2h30 minute journey from Paris and provide high-speed connections to Munich, Vienna Budapest and Bratislava to the South and the East. Being a fan of this project and pro-nuclear doesn’t necessarily endear me to a certain section of the local population it has to be said. But as the referendum on the subject seems to have well and truly validated - this section is the vocal but very minor minority so I don’t lose too much sleep about that.

A few people have asked me “what about the Testing Expo?” So although I was only on the periphery year, I have been an attendee for well over ten years now, so perhaps a few words are in order. First of all my impression was that this was the first time that I had the feeling that the EXPO was beginning to really grow into its newish location, (although I missed last year and most of the year before too). I remember the first year after moving from its old home at the top of Killesberg (think Stuttgart’s Mayfair with a view over the city) to the new facilities at the Airport, things seemed a little flat. Partly I think because of a Boyle’s Law type side effect. I seem to remember Killesberg being constantly packed and the first year at the Airport having a fair amount of space around the outside and a distinct reduction of “Bustle” where Bustle would be represented by P in P α 1/V in Boyle.

This year I have the feeling we were back up to Killesberg levels of P, with a couple of changes to the overall makeup. Firstly I think it is extremely noticeable that this industry is in a period both of growth and consolidation. This was underlined by the move in the market towards full service providers so the likes of AVL had huge stands with crowds on them throughout the day and the bigger tool & engineering companies such as Siemens, NI, ETAS, Vector, dSPACE, having a bigger, more professional looking appearance. This left the gaps filled by firms coming from a wider variety of backgrounds than I remember. Firstly Applus+Addiada and a coterie of other proving grounds around the world seemed to be more prominent but then all manner of test and measurement systems reflecting I think the expanded scope of functionality being crammed into the vehicle for increased comfort, safety and connectivity, ranging from vision systems to high-speed DAQ and NVH equipment. Specifically in the engineering tooling side we saw a number of the smaller players clubbing together in one stand and commercially as the Automotive Engineering Tool Alliance or AETA-RICE enabling them to have a presence of similar size to the bigger players. The combination of RA consulting, CarMediaLab, Intrepid controls and emotive is a highly interesting one with a significant coverage of the development & test processes for vehicle networks, diagnostics and telematics alongside distribution through further Value-added-reseller networks around the globe.

This brings me onto the topic I wanted to float this week – that of Culture (and War and Religion). That’s right, I must be insane. But while digital natives appear to prefer trying to kill themselves by jumping out of planes, off mountains or buildings, with or without a board attached to their feet, the extent of my sojourn into extreme sports extends only as far as skiing, motorcycling and slipping on ice after one-to-many Glühwein in the winter, so I have to counter my apparent lack of adrenaline-inducing activity with potentially offending large sections of the population with vigorous exploitation of the freedom of speech, expression and the exchange of ideas available to those fortunate enough to be located in a country and society that tolerates such things.

There have been a few triggers for this apparent suicide mission. Firstly I posted or reposted an article from Wirtschaftswoche, ( https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/industrie/haier-chef-zhang-ruimin-zhang-ruimin-zur-arbeit-der-zukunft/11740152-2.html) - which is an interview with the Boss of Haier, China’s biggest consumer-goods manufacturer with a staggering 10,2% of the global market-share in major appliances. The title of this article, “The firm of the future will have no employees any more” was both provocative and slightly misleading but I wasn’t prepared for the reactions from some of our fellow webizens. These can be summarized by: “this is total Bullshit!”. It reminded me of a film sequence from True Stories, by David Byrne from Talking Heads where Spalding Gray destroys the dinner table to his wife’s horror while recanting the changes going on in corporate culture by using a salad as a metaphor for the corporation and pieces of vegetables representing spin-offs from the corporation. He ends with the statement “People won’t know the difference between working and not working any more” and the shot switches to an executive standing in his office dancing in a way that would appear to indicate prior consumption of some kind of psychoactive substance.
Secondly later in the week Don Peppers on LinkedIn (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-employees-do-when-ones-looking-don-peppers?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share) posted an article entitled “What employees do when nobody is looking” which hinted at the role that corporate culture plays, both in employee well being – but arguably more importantly to the success and successful implementation of corporate goals and strategies. Lastly a number of friends and colleagues have returned over the past few years in Silicon Valley reporting exactly the True Stories Scenario. People don’t seem to know the difference between working and not-working any more. Whilst this has been mainly true for me for most of my working life I have always seemed to be in a minority in thinking that if I didn’t want to get up for work then I should try and find something else to do. And certainly since being married and becoming a father I have had to take into consideration the views of other people when contemplating telephone conferences at 0300 and months of continuous business travel.

So I think the point of Don Pepper’s post and certainly the point of this one is from where and how do we derive our cultural foundations in business? And why should we seriously be concerned about culture anyhow when it is really only a warm-fuzzy nice-to-have? We wanna make money right?

Firstly it has become somewhat of a truism that most business culture and management theory bases itself on the teachings of military thinkers. This is somehow extremely controversial and somewhat unfashionable especially in Germany and Japan for obvious reasons (don’t mention the war), where it is often greeted with total and understandable abhorrence. However the desire to ignore the teachings of some of the greatest military thinkers (I would make Clausewitz – On War , Sun Tzu - The Art of War and Nicolo Machiavelli – Il Principe, compulsory reading for example) is really missing the point. The reason why these Thinkers have something to teach even the most liberal and humanist management-guru, is precisely that they were concerned with managing situations where people would die. That somehow focuses the mind. Probably better than anything else I can think of.

Secondly Religion and as a Christian friend once taught me – perhaps it is better that I state my position up front here to avoid any misunderstandings. On the Dawkins scale,  (Full believer = 1, complete Atheist 7),  I rate a 6-7 which puts me on the Agnostic side of complete Atheist. In Islamic terms I’m something like a scientific Sufi which makes me hated by just about everyone including scientists and Sufis. However having stated my position I also firmly subscribe to the notion attributed to Voltaire but in fact emanating from his biographer “S.G Tallentyre”, a lady called Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote under a male Pseudonym in order to get published, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Billy Connolly the British (and Scottish – I may be among the few now who believe you can be both ) comedian put it in more amusing terms when discussing the existence or non-existence of God. “If you believe in God, If you have a pleasant and fulfilling chat with him on your way to work, then who am I to tell you he doesn’t exist. Its none of my business.” I’m paraphrasing but the gist was just that and I largely concur as long as he doesn’t tell you to put an axe in my head along the way.

This is also somehow at the foundation of what we are talking about when we discuss nurturing culture in our business lives. A colleague recently published a list of useful quotes for developing an agile company culture and among it was one that said something like “You can believe what you like, but you can’t ignore the facts”. Which is fine. But it ignores the way that human culture, psychology and the way things generally work. This is  much more akin to there being a model of reality that your mind creates and constantly validates against experience – and it is this model – not necessarily the objective reality that determines how you behave. And this is where religion has its role to play. You can say and think what you like about religion or religions but one thing that you have to admit is that whatever they are, they are all the result of many very intelligent people sitting down and thinking about how to go about creating a common internal model of reality for a group of people (or the ENTIRE UNIVERSE…evil laugh heehaahaahaw).

So religion in most respects informs how we develop corporate and brand culture today. The use of symbols (Cross, Star of David, Nike Flash). Snappy corporate mission statements (Ten Commandments, Five Pillars), Rituals (Kanban, SCRUM, Friday Prayers). So don’t ignore them and if you happen to be having a dialogue with a chap in the sky with a big long white beard then enjoy it and give him my best regards.

That seems to make a suitable conclusion for this week, so I’ll leave it there – perhaps its divine intervention. But next week I want to go a bit further into trying to understand the reaction to the Zhang Ruimin/Haier interview and look in a bit more detail into what I can see going on in corporate culture in general, but especially in Automotive and the Internet of Things. Thanks again if you made it this far. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to discuss further and have a great weekend!

The contents of this post are those of Mr David Bailey and do not necessarily represent the views of ETAS GmbH or Robert Bosch GmbH who are his employer.