Re: Business cultures

On Tue, 11 Feb 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-02-11, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

Really? I thought it was only appropriate for sweden, but there you go.

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On Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:03:31 +0100, D wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvang,_California
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Okay, so its Danish. Close enough.

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Yup, 40 minutes drive from my house in Santa Barbara.
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There were snags. In the middle of a large project one of the client's
people came to view the progress. His reputation preceded him. Straight
arrow, didn't drink, didn't chew, and didn't go with girls who do. The
sales department had a melt down. "What the hell are we going to do with
him?"
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Travel in those circles and you get the impression the country is run by
high functioning alcoholics.

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Do they still do that? I remember the movie depictions of the
"three-martini lunches" in the 1960s. Or the depiction of Charlie Wilson
(R-TX) in "Charlie Wilson's War". But I never lived it. Except ...
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When I worked in a Danish version of "3 guys in a garage", we decided we
needed to boot revenue, so we hired an old-style salesguy. We knew he
was not really our kind of guy, but he had a reputation for success, so
we thought we'd try him out. It came to an abrupt end, when we sent him
to a trade show one city over, and learned that he had been ordering
champagne to the sauna at the conference hotel to show off ... not to
the prospective customers, but to his old colleagues from his previous
job. Did not go over with his new boss.
>
We had a work culture where our lunch room had a fridge with cold beer,

This is the truth! Denmark was built on Tuborg! =D Also, as per the youtube link some month back, there are theories that danish split from norwegian when the danes invented beer. ;)

and a tick-off sheet to mark what you took, and we'd settle at the end
of the month. And if you worked late, you charged your beers to the
company. No one argued about your travel expenses. "If I ever have to
question your expense report, that will be your last day here. If I
can't trust you, I can't have you around." I've never seen that in
America.

Trust is important. One of my new freelancers wasted 2 hours of my time today bitching over his contract. The contract was 1.5 pages long.
A week before, my customer told me they thought he was unstructured, grumpy and slow to respond. I thought they were just negotiating (contract negotiating season coming up).
After todays call with him, I won't be renewing his contract with me.
Sometimes I do not understand people.