Practice Management

German boards are different.

By Dan Hull

From a side-bar in an article by Stefan Stern we liked in the Financial Times last month on corporate governance. The US, UK, Japan and Germany were covered. The summary below may help explain why some German management segments are so deliberate, i.e. slower than you'd think, as managers are genuinely consensus-oriented, with a "hurry up and wait" style in deals and disputes. The last sentence, of course, is barely veiled corker.

Germany: The post-war German settlement enshrined the ?two-tier board? in German corporations-?a supervisory board and a management (or executive) board. The supervisory board includes worker representation, laying the foundation for ?Mitbestimmung? or ?co-determination?, a consultative approach to managing the business. This model, too, is under pressure today, criticised for hampering organisations? ability to change fast. That presupposes that changing fast is necessarily always a good thing, of course.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on June 27, 2008 (boomark / email).