Hello, I am Beate Brinkman, the bbr.harlekin.
I am editor and author for Harlekin.Blog e.V. and my “main job” is support coordinator in an international IT company. So far I have worked in German, Dutch, American and Indian companies and have acquired a great deal of experience of multicultural cooperation. I have been living in the Netherlands as a German for many years and have discovered that the cultural differences between Germans and Dutch alone could fill entire books.
For professional and private reasons, I am particularly interested in multicultural (mis)understanding. Whether it’s about food, language, official conference calls or the organisation of funerals – when the cultures of several countries collide, things get lively. And that leads to sometimes unpleasant, often very funny, but always instructive situations.
About company takeovers – and those taken over (Part 1)
According to Manager Magazin, more than 2000 German companies were acquired in 2021 – despite Corona.(1) This not only involves huge financial transactions, but also employees who suddenly have a new employer on “D-Day”. And – in contrast to changing companies by applying for a job – they did not choose it themselves.
Like every year in late autumn, bulb planting day is approaching. I usually get things moving by giving my husband a whole sackful for his birthday, and selecting and shopping for the bulbs at the garden centre is definitely the more attractive part of this project for me.
Here in the Netherlands I am often asked very interesting questions. Older relatives of my husband’s, who are not familiar with navigation devices (or even Google Maps), call and ask me for the best route to drive from Würzburg to Tauberbischofsheim. Now, I haven’t been to this – undoubtedly very beautiful – region of Germany very often and can’t do much to enlighten them. That’s why I almost have a guilty conscience.
Let me say this right away: I don’t really know anything about project management – what I do know is just enough for the usual small projects of my professional and private everyday life. And I don’t need to know much more about it.
My motivation for reading “The Crazy PMPprep” (A novel to prepare for PMP and CAPM certification) was therefore not to further qualify myself in the field of project management (or even to get certified), but simply curiosity. I witnessed various discussions between the authors during the writing process and wanted to know what exactly it was all about. So I asked the authors, my Harlequin colleagues BCO and RGE, for the manuscript and after only 30 pages fell for the charm of the tragic hero Henri, music therapist in a psychiatric institution.
A few days ago I had a look at a training video on LinkedIn. The course was about “Empathy for Customer Service Professionals” and while I was actually looking for something completely different I was hooked. (That’s what often happens on these platforms – the algorithms send you merrily through the inventory and at some point you’ve completely forgotten what you were originally looking for).
The course was relatively short and an American trainer explained clearly what empathy is all about. Some practical examples were role-played.
they have their say on Fridays as usual, but with very short contributions! We’re on holiday – at home or elsewhere – and looking for inspiration for new topics.
We wish you all a wonderful summer!
Your Harlequin Team
When harlequins go on holiday…
… they can be lazy – and delegate the yoga lesson to the frogs in the garden. Then they let their foreheads go all soft!
In previous posts I have dealt several times with the culinary differences between Germany and the Netherlands – and they also exist in the case of the greatest of all summer pleasures, barbecuing. However, the differences are not so much culinary, but rather ideological. The Dutch are a people of flat hierarchies, they can’t stand it when one person has a greater say than anyone else. This is true in politics as well as in daily life, and I suspect that the royal family is also so popular because their representatives de facto have quite little to say.
A while ago, elections were held in the Netherlands – and as in Germany, this fact had a great impact on all the news programmes and political talk shows in the weeks beforehand, where viewers were confronted with rather contrived and tiring battles of words. The situation in the Netherlands is somewhat confusing simply because it takes four or five parties to form a government (out of a total of 18 (!) parties represented in parliament) rather than two or three as in Germany.
A breath of fresh air came from the Dutch “Jeugdjournaal” – the daily children’s news programme I became a fan of when I started learning Dutch years ago. The top candidates of the six largest parties were guests there three days before election day, along with children, of course (this time only a dozen, due to Corona).
Let’s be clear from the start: This post is not about the excessive use of alcohol! This time it’s actually exactly what it says.
Several years ago, a former colleague and still good friend of mine, a Frenchwoman who lives in Germany, came into the office in the morning completely shocked. She told me that she had spoken to her mother in France on the phone that morning and in the course of the conversation wanted to tell her that she had bought a new bathrobe. But she couldn’t think of the French word for “bathrobe”! She was very startled by this and feared that she was forgetting her mother tongue.
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