Lessons learned from a trip to China
They say you learn from traveling – so what did our travels teach us? This was the question that Professor Dr. Michael Auer, Dr.-Ing. Walter Beck and Uwe Haug found themselves asking after a business trip to China. It prompted them to challenge long-held assumptions and share some food for thought. Which conditions help or hinder us when we seek to create and enable opportunities to compete? Are China and Germany really “rival systems”, or are they actually just two sides of the same coin? This Steinbeis Swipe article describes the waves that were triggered and went on to resonate in all directions among the three authors, both during and after the trip.
All three of us grew up as active sportsmen and have also helped young people with their sporting development. Talent, training, mindset and competitiveness were all key to both our successes and our failures. As amateurs, we could afford to put a positive spin on any outcome – after all, our livelihood didn’t depend on it. But we always felt it was important to use the positives to fuel our development while at the same time clearly addressing the areas where we could do better – realistically, with healthy optimism, and not least with a view to further developing and improving our performance.
The three of us are also all engineers who have learned to understand complex topics, design experiments and systematically develop solutions to real problems, competing with others in these endeavors. But the difference from our amateur sporting activities is that this is our profession, and we do depend on it for our livelihood. We can’t afford to simply put a positive spin on every outcome. At the end of the day, failure isn’t the same as success. Getting it wrong means losing the project or job and the revenue – coming a close second is no consolation. If we lose a “match”, it means the others did better at the things that matter – they took their chance better than we did. If you’ve been the best for a long time, you can acquire something of an aura. But you don’t get to be the best simply by believing you’re the best – you have to actually be better than the rest, keep working hard at it, and earn the right to self-confidence by taking control of your own destiny.
Germany’s days as a technology leader are over
What has any of this got to do with foreign travel? We recently had the opportunity to travel to China, where we gained a deep insight into the state administration and their approach to producing research, technologies, products and services and to developing the skills of talents and businesses. One important lesson learned is that it would be foolhardy to believe that Germany still has a general aura of technological, intellectual and cultural productivity, leadership or superiority.
If Germany’s universities, enterprises and public administration want to be the best, then they have to stave off the competition (without protective tariffs and prohibiting collaboration, although still being prepared to resort to the appropriate subsidies if necessary) by being better and winning “the game”.
If you simplify the criteria for evaluating individual performance (e.g. work/time or grade/result), then you might be forgiven for thinking that we’re still better – or at least there might seem to be some hope of us still competing successfully.
If you didn’t win, you lost
While we were in China, we saw autonomous systems products that may not be totally superior in every case, but which are very quickly (allowed to be) used in real-world applications. This means it won’t be at all long before they become superior and prevail in the market. We saw production facilities that – in terms of what “comes out” of them – are superior in every respect, thereby contributing to the products’ market penetration. We saw public administrations where bureaucracy is used as a real enabler rather than being a de facto hindrance. And as far as skills development is concerned, we saw young people and enterprises who want to get ahead for their own good and the good of their country and are committed to performing and winning in order to do so. But first and foremost, we saw people who have embraced competition and are outperforming us in more and more respects. If we fail to be and remain competitive, these people will end up beating us. And, lest we forget, this is a tough contest that is all about winning, not least so we can earn the money that we want to spend.
That said, we are convinced that, as well as driving us to compete against each other, the desire to win a competition can also motivate us to build bridges in order to leverage dynamic synergies between opposite “poles” (systems, competitors, parties in a conflict). By dynamically bringing together parties that may at first sight seem incompatible in order to build synergistic relationships with our global competitors, we can harness the energy inherent in this tension to jointly create advances that benefit our economy, our society and the next generation.
Relativism no longer cuts it for us. Take the frequently cited example of solar panels – there’s simply no getting away from the fact that much the same thing is likely to happen with electrolyzers, cars, manufacturing technology in general, and drive technologies, for example. And the argument that these are “isolated cases” no long holds water for us either, because the law of large numbers applies here (China has a population of approximately 1.4 billion, compared to just 80 million in Germany).
We must work together rather than against each other
We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that our sobering experience in China entitles us to tell others what they should be doing. What we can (and must) do is draw on our Chinese experience in the areas we are responsible for ourselves and use it to inform our decisions for Steinbeis and the people who trust us.
We can’t change the conditions and the key competitive disadvantages in Germany ourselves, and it’s pretty clear that nobody can do so without disruption. What we can and must do is develop solutions with partners in China so that we can compete together wherever we can, wherever we are allowed to and wherever we should, and by doing so remain competitive ourselves both today and during/after the disruption – while upholding the values we believe in. In particular, these include a commitment to social responsibility based on human dignity, considering the future of the next generation, and framing competition as an opportunity to jointly add value(s) rather than a straight fight between two rivals.
For us, de-risking but not decoupling means
- not banning something in order to stop doing it (wrong), but regulating it in order to do it right (successfully), and
- not tearing down the remaining bridges so that both sides can still use them in the future.
During our trip, it became overwhelmingly clear to us that
- what we have here in Germany isn’t a shortage of skilled labor but (still) a labor shortage and a shortage of technical skills,
- if we’re still leaders at all (in terms of the things that are really needed), then we’re only leaders in certain subdomains,
- countries like China rub their hands with glee at every piece of anti-competitive red tape we bring in at federal, state or EU level, since these restrictions only serve to strengthen their competitiveness,
- in many important respects, we’ve learned more from China than they have from us,
- Steinbeis nevertheless still makes us attractive and better in some respects.
This motivates us to do what we can to support Steinbeis and to implement solutions with Steinbeis wherever the best place to implement them may be, so that we can remain attractive in a challenging competitive environment.
In order to gain an understanding and form an opinion of the reality on the ground, and in order to form our own vision of the future, it was important for us to learn from our travels. The lessons we learned were similar from everyone we met on our trip, even the chance encounters. But it seems that some people don’t learn as much from their travels as they could. Otherwise, surely those responsible would long since have made the necessary disruptive changes to the conditions that are damaging our competitiveness, changes that are so important to our society as a whole, and in particular to the key pillars formed by its universities, research institutions and enterprises.