The ascent of English : Germany
Burkhard Schwenker is finding life fairly tough. Roland Berger the Munich-based strategy consultancy of which he is chief executive has been expanding faster outside its home country than within it, partly as a consequence of a sluggish local economy.
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While Mr Schwenker says things are picking up in the world's third largest economy, he bemoans a negative perception in Germany about what the country's businesses are capable of. “There is too much talk of weaknesses, and not enough about strengths,” he says. At least some of the reasons for this, he says, can be laid at the door of what might seem an unusual culprit the German language.
“If I want to talk about growth and ambition, I find it a lot easier if I speak in English, rather than German,” says Mr Schwenker. “Imagine I want to say to some people: ‘Let's go for it, and let's do it together.' I can say this in English, and people will listen, but if I say it in German it takes up too many words, and [the phrasing] is impossible.”
Roland Berger is one of the world's largest strategy consultancies, and the only one of the top 10 that is based in Europe rather than the US. As the head of this organisation, which derives around half of its �500m (￡343m) annual revenues from outside its home country, Mr Schwenker's views carry some weight. But the notion that the German language is inhibiting the German economy is bound to be controversial. It may be famous for its convoluted sentence structures but the German language has also allowed such intellectual giants as Friedrich Schiller, the playwright, and Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, to communicate perfectly adequately.
Still more arresting is the idea advanced not by Mr Schwenker, but by others that some German words and phrases associated with exhorting people to do better have been debased by the country's former Nazi leaders and those in charge of the former communist East Germany. According to this view, many business people in Germany find it easier to slip into English when trying to express themselves in an upbeat way.
One person who agrees with Mr Schwenker is Manfred Puhlmann, chief executive of Edscha, a medium-sized German car parts maker with plants around the world. “You can convey more of a ‘can-do' attitude when speaking English, compared to when you say the same words in German,” he says. “In German there are more redundancies of language, and a greater carry-over of the complexities of history. You see this in meetings when [German] people are speaking English especially when they carry on doing this, even after the last English [native] speaker has left the room.”
Hubertus von Grünberg, chairman of the supervisory board of the Continental tyre company, says the German language “is multi-faceted and has an enormous potential to convey to people the most complex thoughts and emotions”.
But he adds: “Because of the rise of Nazism and its consequences, many Germans are shy about displaying patriotism and showing themselves to be in any way demagogic. As a result, a lot of Germans are scared about coming across as too strongly emotional. In a business setting this can mean German managers steer away from using any type of emotional language, when they want to try to motivate people. There is, therefore, a natural tendency to use English as an alternative.”
Berthold Leibinger, chief executive of Trumpf, a machine tool company in Stuttgart, says: “If we [Germans] speak English, it's as though we change clothes. We switch towards more Anglo-Saxon attitudes which are about togetherness, common sense and a pragmatic way of living the kind of attitudes you tend to associate more readily with the US.”
Mr Leibinger also sees the lingering effects of the wartime era, when many German words and phrases were “abused” for propaganda purposes. And later, says Mr Leibinger, words such as Freundschaft (German for friendship) were closely associated with the communist regime of former East Germany. In those times Freundschaft was used as a word of comradely greeting. The word is difficult for many ordinary Germans to use now, says Mr Leibinger, because it evokes memories of dictatorship.
“That's why so many English words are used in Germany especially in a context when people are discussing some kind of emotion or are giving a pep talk. There are a lot of German words that are off-limits,”he says.
Not everyone agrees with this and some disagree vehemently. Hartmut Mehdorn is chief executive of Deutsche Bahn, the train operator, and a man with long experience in the German business community, having held high-level jobs at Daimler Aerospace and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, the printing machine maker. He says that the key factor in communicating is not the language, but the message. “[If you have a good message], you can say it in English, German or Greek, and the audience will understand and be motivated. Each language gives us the tools [for communicating ideas] but it is up to the speaker to use the right ones.”
Werner Schmitz, who studies the use of German in the business world at the Goethe Institut, a Munich-based group that promotes German culture and language, says: “German isjust as good as English when it comes to motivating people. It is just that the slogans are different.”
But suppose that Mr Mehdorn and Mr Schmitz are wrong, and some ideas to do with motivating people are easier to convey in English than in German. How should German managers respond to this? In practice, many of them already use English a lot, since a large number of German companies have international operations. Deutsche Bank, for instance, has had English as its main working language for years.
Even so, when speaking in a room full of German speakers, Mr Schwenker says it would seem “rather contrived” if he used only English. He might, however, use English terms such as “turnround” or “IPO” that have slipped into German business-speak because their meaning is easy to grasp and they are concise. Mr von Grünberg of Continental says he would never use English in a meeting with only German participants, because this would look false and somehow indicate he was trying to impress them with his knowledge of another language.
Others have pointed out another pitfall of slipping too much English into discussions in Germany: fewer people may understand the language than the speaker realises (see side panel).
Tobias Hagenmeyer is chief executive of Getrag, a German maker of gearboxes for cars, which has a joint venture with the Ford motor company in transmissions, where English is the main working language. He says: “I am convinced that [in meetings involving English being spoken to a large group of German speakers] some percentage of precision is lost in the conversation.”
Perhaps the one lesson that can be drawn is that German companies should simply continue their impressive use of English. It has, after all, enabled many German companies to perform well in countries where use of English has become a key tool in communicating ideas to customers as well as employees.
Within groups of German speakers, there is little likelihood or need for German business people to employ English all the time. Since the use of this language around the world is almost certain to grow the more German people who can understand and use English, the better the prospects for the German economy.
That said, the dual-language approach conceals clear dangers, perhaps the greatest of which is that speakers may assume everyone in a meeting has a good understanding of a language when really they do not. If managers choose to embrace the rise of English as the international language of commerce, they would do well to be aware of the problems its use can create.
Tomorrow: how English is taking root in Chinese business
COMPUTER INDUSTRYMicrosoft's private settlements top $3.5bnBy Richard Waters
in San FranciscoPayments made by Microsoft to escape its antitrust morass are set to top $6.5bn, following news yesterday that the world's largest software group would pay $150m to Gateway, a PC maker, and set aside another $550m against further legal claims.
Along with a $43m charge to reflect a settlement with Be Inc, a software maker, last month, this will result in a pre-tax charge in the latest quarter of more than $700m, Microsoft indicated.
The Gateway settlement takes to six the number of companies in the computer industry with which Microsoft has reached private agreements, at a combined cost of more than $3.5bn.
It has also incurred costs of more than $1.8bn to settle state-level antitrust suits in the US and paid a fine of about $600m to the European Commission.
The new provision against future costs suggests that other big payments still lie ahead before the company can finally put the legal problems dating from the mid-1990s behind it.
Among the biggest are a private case bought by RealNetworks, whose software is at the centre of the EU's action against Microsoft, and a class action in New York, one of only a handful of states still pursuing a claim.
Like Novell, a technology group that received $536m in a settlement last year, Gateway has never filed a lawsuit against Microsoft.
However, the judge overseeing the US government's case against Microsoft at the late 1990s said the computer maker had suffered “significantly more” than others when it was penalised for resisting Microsoft's demands. Gateway has agreed to forgo any legal claim in return for $150m in payments over the next four years, the two sides said.
The payments will be linked to research and development, advertising and other costs that Gateway faces in launching products that depend on Microsoft software.
These include PCs that run on the next generation of its Windows operating system, due out next year, as well as Media Center PCs designed for living room use and the Office suite of productivity software, according to one person close to the settlement.
Like Intel, Microsoft already shares some of the costs computer makers face in advertising machines based on its products. However, Microsoft said the payment to Gateway was a legal settlement and not linked to these arrangements.
The decision to set aside a provision of $550m appeared to suggest that Microsoft was nearer to reaching other antitrust settlements.
用英语开会的德国企业家
布克哈德?施文克尔(Burkhard Schwenker)发现日子相当难过。他是总部位于慕尼黑的战略咨询公司罗兰贝格(Roland Berger)的首席执行官。这家公司在国外的扩张速度一直比在国内快，这部分是由国内经济不景气导致的。
虽然施文克尔先生说德国这个全球第三大经济体的状况正在好转，但他悲叹，德国国内对企业能力的感觉消极。“有关弱点的谈论太多，而关于强势却说得不够多，”他说，这种局面至少部分可归咎于一个似乎奇特的罪魁祸首――德语。
“如果我想谈论增长和雄心壮志，我发现用英语来说会比用德语容易得多，”施文克尔先生表示。“假设我要对某人说：‘去干吧，让我们齐心协力。’我可以用英语来讲，人们会听我的，但如果我用德语来说，则要用太多单词，而(这样的措辞)是不可能的。”
罗兰贝格是全球最大的战略咨询公司之一，也是全球10佳战略咨询公司中唯一一家总部在欧洲而非美国的公司。该公司5亿欧元(合6.48亿美元)年收入中约有一半来自德国以外。作为该公司首席执行官，施文格尔先生的观点自然有些份量。但若说德语正在阻碍德国的经济增长，这一看法必然会引起争议。或许德语以句型结构复杂而出名，但凭借这种语言，剧作家弗里德里希?席勒(Friedrich Schiller)和哲学家叔本华(Arthur Schopenhauer)等思想巨人可以十分畅达地进行表述。
还有一个更引人注目的观点，它不是施文克尔先生而是其他人提出的。这个观点是，德语中有一些与激励人们进步相关的词汇和短语，但它们已被德国前纳粹领导人和前东德共产主义政权给贬损了。据这种观点称，许多德国商界人士在试图以乐观方式表达看法时，发现自己更容易采用英语。
有个人赞同施文克尔先生的观点，他就是爱德夏(Edscha)首席执行官曼弗雷德?普尔曼(Manfred Puhlmann)。爱德夏是一家德国中型汽车零部件生产商，工厂遍布世界各地。“相比德语，用英语说同样的话能更好地传达一种‘干劲’(can-do)。”他说。“在德语中，语言更为冗长累赘，承载着更多复杂的历史因素。你在会议上(德国的)人们讲英语时会明白这一点，尤其是他们一直说下去，即便最后一个(母语)讲英语的人已经离开了会议室的时候。”
大陆(Continental)轮胎公司监事会主席胡贝图斯?冯?格伦贝格(Hubertus von Grünberg)表示，德语“具有多面性”，在向人们传达最复杂的思想和情感方面有巨大的潜力。
但他补充说：“由于当年纳粹主义兴盛及其造成的后果，许多德国人都避免展示爱国主义，也不愿让自己显出任何煽动性。结果，许多德国人都害怕显得太情绪化。在商业环境中，这可能意味着，当德国经理人要设法激励人们的时候，他们会避开使用任何类型富于情感的措辞。因此，他们自然就倾向于使用英语作为替代性语言。”
贝特霍尔德?莱宾格尔(Berthold Leibinger)是斯图加特机床企业通快公司(Trumpf)的首席执行官，他说：“如果我们(德国人)讲英语，就好像我们换了衣服。我们改用更英国化的态度，这种态度意味着齐心协力、判断力和务实的生活方式，而你往往更容易把这些态度与美国联系起来。”
莱宾格尔先生也注意到，一些战争时期的影响徘徊不去，当时为了进行宣传，许多德语词汇和短语被“滥用”。莱宾格尔先生说，之后像“Freundschaft”(德语，意为友谊)等单词就与前东德共产党政权有了紧密的关联。那时候，“Freundschaft”被用作同志般的问候语。莱宾格尔先生说，现在很多普通德国人很难再用这个单词，因为它唤起了许多对专制的回忆。
“正因如此，在德国有这么多英语词汇被使用，当人们讨论某种感情，或发表鼓舞士气的讲话时尤其如此。许多德语词汇已经不适宜。”他说。
并非每个人都赞同这一观点，而且一些人表示强烈反对。哈特穆特?梅多恩(Hartmut Mehdorn)是火车运营商德国铁路股份公司(Deutsche Bahn)的首席执行官，并且曾在戴姆勒宇航公司(Daimler Aerospace)和印刷机械制造商海德堡印刷机械股份公司(Heidelberger Druckmaschinen)担任高层职位，因而在德国商界有长期的经验。他表示，交流的关键因素不在于语言，而在于讯息。“(如果有好的讯息)，你可以用英语、德语或是希腊语来表达，听众会理解并且得到激励。每一种语言都给了我们(交流思想的)工具，但是否使用了恰当的工具则取决于说话者。
沃尔纳?施米茨(Werner Schmitz)在歌德学院(Goethe Institut)研究德语在商界的使用，他说：“在激励人方面，德语和英语一样有效。存在差异的只是口号。” 歌德学院总部位于慕尼黑，该集团专门推广德国文化和德语。
但是，假设梅多恩先生和施米茨先生都错了，而一些与激励人有关的想法用英语比用德语更容易传达，德国的经理们将对此作何反应呢？实际上，由于许多德国企业拥有国际运营业务，他们中许多人已大量使用英语。例如，德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)多年来一直把英语作为主要工作语种。
即便如此，施文克尔先生说，如果整个房间的人都说德语，那么他在里面只说英语的话，会显得“相当做作”。然而，他可能使用已成为德国商业用语的英语术语，如“turnaround”(情况好转)或者“IPO”（首次公开发行)，因为它们的意思容易领会，而且简明扼要。大陆轮胎的冯?格伦贝格先生表示，如果一场会议的与会者都是德国人，他从不说英语，因为这似乎是一种矫饰，而且在某种程度上表明，他正试图用他在另一门语言上的知识让人留下印象。
其他一些人已经指出，在德国进行讨论时，过多穿插英语的另一缺陷在于：能听懂英语的人可能比讲话者以为的要少。
托比亚斯?哈根迈尔(Tobias Hagenmeyer)是德国汽车变速箱制造商盖瑞特(Getrag)的首席执行官。在该公司与福特(Ford)汽车公司合资成立的一家传动装置企业里，英语是主要的工作语种。他说：“我相信，(在会议上，如果对一大群说德语的人讲英语)，谈话将会丧失一定的准确性。”
也许从中可以吸取一个经验，即德国公司完全应该继续大力使用英语。毕竟，在一些国家，使用英语已成为同客户及雇员交流思想的重要工具，而德国公司也凭借英语在那里取得了优异表现。
在说德语的群体中，德国商人几乎不可能、也不需要一直使用英语。既然世界各地几乎肯定会越来越多地使用英语，那么能够理解并使用英语的德国人越多，德国经济的发展前景就将越光明。
话虽如此，双语的做法显然隐藏着一些危险，或许其中最严重的危险是，发言者可能会假定，会场中每个人都精通某种语言，但事实并非如此。英语正兴起为国际商务语言，如果管理者选择接受这一点，他们就会很好地意识到，英语的使用可能带来种种问题。
