Word: germanically
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...hard to feel sorry for a guy who walks away from a job with a check for €50 million ($71 million). So while a few Germans see Wendelin Wiedeking, departing CEO of German sports car maker Porsche, as the victim of a public lynching by media, few feel bad for him. Wiedeking had a 17-year run at Porsche, the Stuttgart-based sports car icon which has just failed in its bid to take over motoring giant Volkswagen and will now be merged into the VW group. He took the job when Porsche was on the skids and transformed...
...many, leveraging his company in a gambit to acquire the much larger carmaker. He failed because he underestimated the political opposition to a takeover of VW and ended up saddling Porsche with $13 billion in debt. As his star was sinking, Wiedeking went from hero in the German public's eye to a victim of his own massive hubris. In his way, Wiedeking is Germany's symbol of the greed generation, just as Bernie Madoff is in the U.S. or the Royal Bank of Scotland's Fred Goodwin is in Britain. Not a criminal like Madoff, obviously, but someone...
...rail operator of cutting corners to save money, putting the safety of its passengers and employees at risk. "We warned a long time ago, as far back as 2003, that there were faults on the wheels of Berlin's S-Bahn trains," says Oliver Kaufhold, a spokesman for the German rail union Transnet. "When a third of the city's engineering depots have been shut down and they've cut back staff numbers, it's obvious something will crack one day." (See pictures of Barack Obama visiting Berlin...
...century ago, Max Weber, the great German sociologist, famously divided sources of authority into three types: the traditional, the charismatic and the legal-bureaucratic. Americans like their leaders to be charismatic--a word derived from the Greek that means a person has a gift of grace. Political parties routinely look for presidential candidates with charisma (Barack Obama, naturally) and regret it when they don't find one (think Michael Dukakis). (See TIME's Barack Obama covers...
Besides, a certain homely style can make your adversaries underestimate you. German Chancellor Angela Merkel may look like a typical hausfrau, but don't cross her. "She's ruthless," says a political insider in Berlin. "She doesn't just sideline her opponents; she destroys them...