Before starting a new mission in 2020, I had read the following:

“There is a major difference in mentality between France and Germany. The German mentality is more “Nordic”. German employees are used to a very horizontal, participative, collaborative management style.”

I experienced exactly the opposite in the former East Germany. So who to believe?

Over the years of my career, I’ve had the good fortune to come into contact with a wide variety of cultures in Belgium, France, the UK, the USA, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil and China…none of which has left me as questioning and doubtful as German culture, particularly during my most recent experience in Pomerania, in the north-east of Germany, which was once known as East Germany.

Without turning my description into a cliché, I knew Germans to be rigorous, determined to do things right, disciplined, with a definite ability to apply established rules. In this region, I discovered a people at the forefront of social distancing and extraordinary conformism, so much so that I made JFK’s phrase “conformism is the prison of freedom and the major obstacle to progress” my own.

I haven’t been able to unravel the mystery of this behavior: is it due to a local mentality or to a culture purely linked to the company where I worked? The answer undoubtedly lies somewhere between these two truths.

It seems that Germans in general hate making mistakes, but who does?

Perhaps purely local management accentuated this phenomenon. In any case, I found a population, including management, tetanized by the idea of making the slightest mistake, even the most insignificant, in the context of projects involving several million dollars. The result is an infernal circle of FEAR-CONTROL-DEFIANCE-RECONTROL, what I once called in a well-known French laboratory, the “Infernal Spiral of RE”, offering infantilizing management to the young start-ups recruited, when they would be more entitled to expect real mentoring from their so-called “leader”.

So much so that I wondered how German industry could be so successful with such behavior, but no doubt (my previous missions in Goethe’s country having been much warmer including recently in 2023 with Rottendorf Pharma ) I was confronted with a very particular microcosm and a concentration of very determining factors.

EMMANUEL de RYCKEL