Читать книгу Germany's Freefall - Hermann Dr. Rochholz - Страница 6

Germany is considered a “high-tech-country”. Everyone has their own view of things, even the author because he is an engineer, and every profession has its own particular point of view. When a non-engineer “stumbles” over a press release reporting that something was not working or that the matter is 13 years behind schedule, then he will simply accept it. In particular, he can’t evaluate it – how could he anyway?

Then there are those people who want to know what contributed to the failure or the exploding costs because the advantage of mistakes normally is that you can learn from them – both your own and other’s. Nothing is more stupid than repeating a mistake. Unfortunately, it is not possible to learn anything nowadays most of the time because college taught you how you would have done it the right way; or you learned it during the course of your career. The fact is: high-tech is being touted everywhere, but grave mistakes are being made when it comes to the fundamentals. This is a cause for concern because mistakes in the fundamentals are, above all, one thing: extremely expensive.

That took its toll on my former employer: wherever your looked, all you heard about were the losses running into the millions. A lot of money had been spent on advertising. Top-level positions were filled by people who distinguished themselves with their incompetence and who had fallen for “pied pipers” who had sold them their visions. Slogans had been bantered about on how great the company was doing and how great its products were. Critics were sidelined: “We have the Bavarian state as guarantor – nothing can happen to us”, they declared. In hindsight, the company failed because of the sum of all the little things. A few days before the insolvency, the company wanted to rivet 0.8 mm sheet steel to the (aluminum) wings, as the torsional stiffness³ of these wings had proven to be insufficient. Problems were known long beforehand, but had been swept under the carpet over the years, and none had been solved at the root. People had just “tinkered” with the symptoms. In the end, everything converged upon itself.

German politics is nothing more than a “flashback”.