Word: adapting
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...heavily state-influenced economies provide perhaps the clearest example among industrialized countries that more government control does not promote faster development. "Europe has been growing desperately slowly," says Jean-Claude Trichet, chief of staff of France's Ministry of Economy, Finance and Privatization. The Continent has been slow to adapt or innovate as economic events moved rapidly, a condition that was dubbed Eurosclerosis. Its experience with high-technology projects, like the Anglo- French Concorde supersonic jet and the national French computer program, have been costly disappointments...
Then she says, she started talking to others: "Many people said they thought they were so good and then they came here and felt like they were just nobody." Now, she says, she realized that in the beginning, "everybody's trying to adapt to the class...
...System 12, a computerized switching board that telephone companies use to route calls. The unit, which cost $1 billion to develop, sold well after it was unveiled in Europe in 1979, but it has turned a profit only in West Germany and Italy. Araskog thought that if he could adapt System 12 to U.S. standards, he could sell it to the regional Bell companies, which were formed after the AT&T breakup in 1984. But ITT was unable to write software that would mesh System 12 with most existing U.S. phone networks. AT&T and Northern Telecom both made popular...
Foreign languages do not simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...
Faced with long odds, an entrepreneur must know when to give up and when to adapt. Robert I. Earl owned an Elizabethan "theme restaurant" in Orlando called Shakespeare's of Church Street that provided an evening of light wassailing and big eats; last year he moved his operation closer to Disney World and changed the restaurant's name to King Henry's Feast. Why? "People who come to Orlando want to have fun," he told the International Drive Bulletin, "and too many people thought Shakespeare's was something serious and cultural...