Business culture is usually deeply rooted in a country's overall cultural landscape, since it has spent a lot of time figuring out how to be successful in a given set of circumstances. All of us have heard of advertising campaigns that fell flat because they didn’t consider the local nuances. This article in the Harvard Business Review goes a little deeper and looks at one of the standouts of America’s hard-charging technology companies. Uber is part of the new "sharing economy” which allows people to make money sharing something that they already have. AirBnB let’s you share your living space, Uber does it for you car. Both companies have to deal with regulators and strong entrenched industries they are trying to disrupt, the hotel industry and taxi industry respectively. Uber stands out with its brash way of trying to muscle in on the target market, for example insisting that it will ignore German court orders to suspend its business in the country.
As the author of the following article points out, the European markets are probably not as receptive to its offering on a few levels. The experience of hiring a taxi there is simply not that bad. On a cultural level however, Uber is definitely not making any friends if it revels in defying the rules everybody else has to follow. This might play well in an individualistic country like the US, but not so much in a more rule-based country like Germany.
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/09/to-succeed-in-germany-uber-needs-to-grow-up/
As the author of the following article points out, the European markets are probably not as receptive to its offering on a few levels. The experience of hiring a taxi there is simply not that bad. On a cultural level however, Uber is definitely not making any friends if it revels in defying the rules everybody else has to follow. This might play well in an individualistic country like the US, but not so much in a more rule-based country like Germany.
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/09/to-succeed-in-germany-uber-needs-to-grow-up/