Davos Newbies

The Bay Area’s tiffin wallas, according to The New York Times:

In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same.

With the spread of these services, Punjabis can have their saag paneer and meat curries; Gujaratis can have their dal, bhat (rice), shak (vegetables) and rotis (flatbreads); and south Indians their rasam (tomato-based curry). And as demand for home-cooked food on the job has increased, so has the number of outlets providing tiffins.

Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.

I checked Annadaata’s site and, sadly, they don’t deliver to the East Bay. (We do, however, have Vic’s Chaat House around the corner.)

Thomas Otter, who works for SAP in Germany, provides some reflections on the value of the company’s “Germanness”, at a time when siren voices are urging it become more “American”. His post was provoked by the coverage of possible unionization of SAP’s workers, but I think the import of his remarks goes far beyond the side issue of trade unions.

As SAP continues to globalise though, I think it is worthwhile to pause and think back to what has made SAP the success it is. A big part of that success comes from that very “Germanness” that is now perceived by some as unfashionable and irrelevant. Discipline, debate, deliberation, diligence, a focus on detail, a healthy skepticism of “marketing blah-blah”, consensus, thorough execution, and a strong ability to self-criticise are key to SAP’s success to date.

Many of the world’s greatest industries were founded within 30 minutes drive of SAP. The first car drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim, or there abouts. Soon after that Benz built the first car garage in Ladenburg. Friedrich Engelhorn’s BASF, the world’s biggest chemical firm, is just across the river. Many of the world’s great philosophers and mathematicians were German: Gauss, Reimann, Hilbert, Jacobi, Kant, Runge, Hegel, Marx and so on. More recently, MP3 is a German invention. SAP is part of a long line of German innovation.

SAP’s german roots are part of its success and its long term competitive advantage. We should not ignore them. As we grow as a global company, we shouldn’t forget that innovation and engineering are at the core of SAP’s success. At the same time, we need to be open to new ideas from abroad and from people from other companies, and adapt to those new ideas and ways of working. Other great German brands, although global, leverage their German heritage. Vorsprung Durch Technik, for example. But Max Weber, another famous Heidelberger , wrote of “The passion for bureaucratisation drives us to despair” and the “the iron cage of bureaucracy”.

I know which Germany I prefer. The SAP and the Germany that attracts people like me is the Germany of innovators, not of stagnators. Those that fear globalisation will not find safety in further bureaucratisation. To compete, innovate and grow we need less rules, not more.

Particularly at a time when Silicon Valley triumphalism is on the rise again, I hope SAP stays true to the Germanness that Otter describes. The notion that there is only one way to spur innovation, that there is only one corporate culture that works in the 21st century, is madness. That’s equally not to say that Rhineland capitalism has a unique claim. We need all the different flavors of enterprise and history shows that innovation and creativity can, given the right circumstances, thrive in each.

I find debates about the superiority of one model of capitalist enterprise over another sterile. In the late ’90s I had modest success travelling to conferences and giving my stump speech: most of the world doesn’t want to be Silicon Valley (and, by the way, even if they want it, they can’t do it). I was equally baffled at Will Hutton’s The State We’re In climbing the bestseller lists. His book pressed for British enterprise to become more Rhenish and less Anglo-Saxon at precisely the time when the German economy was heading south and the US economy was in the middle of one of history’s great upswings.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

My wife and I occasionally lament that we’ve swapped The Guardian for The New York Times. It’s not that we’re missing much news, it’s that we’re losing bursts of humor and wry cleverness that the serious Times either can’t do or doesn’t deign to do.

If it’s seriousness that you’re looking for, the German papers trump even the Grey Lady (is the Times still called that, now that it has color pictures?). My German is imperfect at best, but I used to goggle at the erudition of sections like the FAZ’s Feuilleton.

Yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung managed nicely to combine great erudition with a sense of humor. For the classically inclined, there’s an Ides of March interview with Wilfried Stroh about Julius Caesar — in Latin (via Adrian Murdoch).