Meeting Tim S.

Meeting Tim S.

Date of conversation: July 9 2011 

Location: San Francisco

Interviewee: Tim S., Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
Typical Saturday morning: no typical Saturday morning really- it depended on Tim's age and activities at the time

I ‘meet’ Tim via Skype on a crisp Saturday morning: after three weeks of living in Northern California, I have come to the conclusion that the weather here would be complex to analyze. While sunny blue skies are to envy from rainy Berlin where Tim currently lives, the cold wind during perfectly sunny days makes me wish for the hot and humid summer feel of the East Coast that time of the year.

Tim picks up the phone sounding cheerful and relaxed: it is Saturday afternoon in Germany and he is at home with his family. I hear chatter at the background and start to wonder whether talking about culture is the top thing Tim wants to discuss right now. He assures me the time is good, and I launch into my first set of questions.

Family and Background
Tim grew up in the town of Bremen, a part of the Bremen- Oldenburg metropolitan area which has over two million residents and is located in Northern Germany. As he describes his hometown, Tim brings up Bremen-based beer bottle manufacturers to jolt my memory of his city name. But having grown up with the Brothers Grimm stories, a bedtime favorite my mother used to read me, he needs to say no more. The Bremen Town Musicians, Tim agrees, are just as worthy symbols of the city.

Tim comes from a traditional German family: his mother stayed at home to raise him, while his dad, a CEO at a German harbor company travelled extensively for work and was the main breadwinner. I ask who influenced him professionally the most, expecting maybe to hear that it was his dad who inspired him to be a leader in his field. Tim doesn’t pause to think twice and says, “It was both my parents, although I must confess that at an early age, I didn’t take much advice from either.” Before college, Tim considered journalism and political science as a potential career track, but a piece of advice from a current journalist kept him away from the former. Tim recollects him saying: “don’t learn journalism, learn something else and then talk or write about it.”

Career in the US
Tim joined a US research institution as a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. That is how I first met Tim in fact: he delivered a lecture at my graduate school at the onset of the financial crisis. The lecture was entirely in German, and as I listened to Tim explain why the German financial system stood a bit stronger than Wall Street, I recall the concepts and the language taking turns to confuse me. All in all, I was impressed by Tim’s professional, and yet very personable presentation on this grim matter, which prompted me to invite him to participate in my study. “It must be his cultural upbringing helping him address issues melding optimism and objectivity so well”, I thought.

I ask Tim my favorite question: how direct are you in your communications at work? Tim responds firmly, “As I get to know people, I become more direct. At the beginning of making an acquaintance, I measure my words twice”, he says. I think about that statement- we all beware what we say and when we say it upon meeting a new colleague or a friend. I wonder though how ‘thinking twice’ has become a part of some corporate cultures and workers who are perceived as more direct (even to colleagues they already know) risk making a name for themselves as non team players, outsiders. The meaning of ‘direct’ I won’t tackle in this research, and I leave it to the reader to interpret as it best fits their understanding of it. Direct, to me, means expressing a thought without explaining where the thought originated from and why.

I look at my watch- it is almost 30 minutes since we started speaking and Tim is as chatty as when we first started talking about culture. I want to ask him my ‘end of conversation’ questions so I bluntly say, “Why do Americans think things are always going to get better?” “Out of experience”, Tim answers quickly again, “The country has gotten created on the basis of that belief. In Germany people think things are going to always get worse. For example, when the economy is doing great, they say this must be the peak and it’s going to get worse from now on.”

Tim, however, doesn’t seem to relate to the half-empty outlook on life. He sounds cheerful, seems to harbor a strong love for Northern California and speaks fondly of the American way of life. Has his cultural upbringing in Germany not given him a proper lens of pessimism to bend through good-fortuned reality? I decide to ponder that question later, and conclude this interview. I thank Tim, and wish him a nice evening. He, smilingly I think, says ‘no problem’ and continues onto enjoying the rest of his weekend.