This past weekend I got a call from one of my German friends. He is the only one of them that is a conservative....but of course, he is no where near as conservative and crazy as his American counterparts. Nonetheless, he shares some of their values. It was interesting because I had known that two weeks before, he was up for a VP position. He's starting to push 40, has a kid on the way and is looking to improve his salary even though he's been doing well to date. He works for Audi and like many German companies, to move up in the ranks, you go to an assessment center for an evaluation. In case you don't know, the assessment center sets up hypothetical situations that you might confront as a manager to see how you would deal with them. After he finished going through the testing which took two days, he sent me an email essentially saying it was a piece of cake. Last Friday, he got the results.......he flunked. This is a guy who went to a good German university, got his Masters in metallurgy engineering from the University of Pittsburgh which is supposed to be an excellent school for that field.....and has worked in the US and Mexico before going back to Germany to work for Audi.
It turns out he flunked because he was weak on diversity issues, did poorly as a team player and showed little empathy for his employees. You know.....he's a sweet guy and I like him a lot....so I was surprised when he didn't do well. Then I thought about it and realized the evaluation is correct. He is weak in all three areas. And this is not the first time these issues have come up. He's had warnings before....from a prior girlfriend and some of his friends....but in typical fashion, he ignored those warnings.
As I continued to think about it.....in a more poltical context, I realized his issues are similar to the ones conservatives have in this country. They don't want to be team players. They don't want to show empathy. They don't particularly like diversity. And as much as the Dems screw up, Rs can't make any headway. And they don't want to learn from their mistakes.
Could conservatism be a disease that transcends borders? I am beginning to wonder. <g> |
