German here and no offense taken, but: What are your grounds for assuming that it is a nation's work ethos that is keeping companies from innovating? How is a m

German here and no offense taken, but: What are your grounds for assuming that it is a nation's work ethos that is keeping companies from innovating? How is a multinational's German work ethos keeping it's Indian or US-American employees from innovating? Why aren't German Ford-Workers failing in Germany because of their american work ethos? It is a rather cajoling prejudice. But in my experience of working in big multinational companies (DAX or DJI enterprises) change isn't prohibited by management's guilt or a society's taboo of layoffs. Instead it's the sheer number of employees, responsibilities and added layers of business-structure. What's adding to the complexity of business structure is that with every country it operates in, new regulations and country specifics are to be dealt with. No new merger or acquisition will result in equilibrium of efficiency. You may have to - out of the most ridiculous reasons - work with a team that's located in another company, city or time-zone - or complete different culture, which means more overhead. I think this work ethos cliche stems from a misconception. Yes, in Japan as in Germany old employees are guarded like infants. But that's often due to the old contracts that they got [1]. Those were granted seldomly since. Instead most of these companies (or rather their work pipelines) are filled with temp staff, external contractors and suppliers. There is no "ethos" protecting those people from being fired immediately. [1] Contracts of war-torn countries. Contracts of countries that just years before believed that they would rule the world and now had to beg for glimpses of sovereignty. Rebuilding the economy was more than about jobs. It was about the gaining back sovereignty. That's why firing those 50 year olds is more expensive than keeping them. And thats why the companies at the same time try to dodge the necessity of having to employ someone just because some external market demand.