Well, being German I think we have seen lots of cultural issues between Franco-German (EADS, Aventis/Hoechst) and Anglo-German (BMW/Rover, Daimler/Chrysler, DeutschePost/DHL) mergers.

I think German companies have started to be very conscious about understanding the businesses they are buying, especially when it comes to business model and corporate culture. It seems that Scandinavian and BeNeLux companies are easier to deal with, while Eastern Europe has been a path to grow organically with a workforce that accepts change and new structures once the German’s have the power.

So I would rule out nationalism (… it’s not France at the end of the day), but a very conservative decision to stick with what you know and who you know.

(BMI/Lufthansa being another exception from the rule…)

Cheers

Daniel

You may well be right, but the market has mechanisms that will allow it to adjust to new media and new communication paradigms very rapidly. Simply put, people (and algorithms) who know who much weight to put on a piece of information will make more money than people (and algorithms) who don’t.

No crowds required.

Thanks for the mention. It’s great to hear about social media tools that were implemented with real support from the top. This is critical to success. I was also interested to hear that your wikis were culture changing. It’s a good reminder that no situation remains static and that, with the right support and tools, we can have an impact and move things forward.

- Mary

Guess what we are seeing is, as you put it, is economic nationalism or patriotism. At first it looked to me like Germany protecting their national champions but in actual fact is a cross boarder trend within the EU. So is it ‘national’?, can I still call it national or is it patriotism of nation-states?

The challenge is to bring convergence to otherwise divergent sources and types of information – IM, email, vMail, CMS, wikis, blogs, etc.

The trick is now less to do with handlng vast quantitities of information – it’s about understanding a user’s intentions when asking a question and quickly delivering the most relevant content.

Dramatic improvements in collaboration will come from matching “intent” to “content” (however diverse). This approach will improve the bottom line performance of individuals, teams and businesses.