Johannes
A Question on Career Paths and Blood Lines
By Konstanze Frischen
FRANKFURT. Sociologist Michael Hartmann thinks he has found the secret to success in Germany: It is a simple question of family ties.
To back up his conclusion, the professor at Darmstadt's Technical University can reel off a number of examples. The chairman of Siemens, Heinrich von Pierer, comes from a line of military officers. Mr. Pierer's father was a colonel and his grandfather a major general. The head of Deutsche Bank, Rolf-E. Breuer, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. His father, for instance, was managing director of the dairy company Allgäuer Alpenmilch.
Mr. Hartmann has underpinned this conclusion with the findings from a survey of 6,500 engineers, lawyers and scientists who graduated in 1955, 1965, 1975 and 1985.
He found that Ph.D. graduates from upper middle-class families, a category that includes entrepreneurs, senior executives, senior government officials, physicians and attorneys, stood a 50 percent to 100 percent better chance of making it to the top in their career field than graduates with lower middle- or working-class backgrounds.
A survey that Mr. Hartmann did in 1995 revealed that roughly 90 percent of chief executive officers of Germany's Top 100 corporations had upper middle-class family backgrounds.
Examples are easily found. The father of former Ergo insurance chairman Edgar Jannot, for instance, was the board chairman of the Gothaer Allgemeine insurance corporation. His uncle was board chairman of the insurer Münchner Rück. Both parents of Deutsche Post chairman Klaus Zumwinkel were entrepreneurs, while the father of Bertelsmann boss Thomas Middelhoff ran a textile company. And Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch's father was an attorney, while his mother was related to Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the automaker Porsche.
Mr. Hartmann says corporate recruitment mechanisms are the reason that the German social elite runs the country's leading corporations. What counts during job interviews, he says, is, in the final analysis, a superior manner and a general education.
Grow up in the right social circles and you will not nervously finger the buttons of your jacket or run your fingers through your hair as you stride across a corporation's executive office. It will be a world with which you are familiar. Candidates with this kind of background will be better able to answer "cultural questions" of the kind that Mr. Hartmann says a leading executive of a German automaker used to ask. For years, candidates for executive positions had to be able to hold their own with him in discussions about the opera.
Mr. Hartmann says family background is important in Germany because, unlike in the United States, Britain or France, this country has no elite universities like Harvard, Cambridge or the ENA. "A degree from Passau is worth just as much as one from Frankfurt. This is why social background is even more important," the Darmstadt sociologist says.
The professor's thesis is not accepted by everyone. Dominik von Winterfeldt, a partner at the personnel consultant Boyden, said, "It would be risky for a company only to appoint people with one-sided characters to key positions." And Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of the Confederation of German Industry, dismisses as utter "rubbish" suggestions that social background is a powerful recruitment filter. He says his own career proves his point. Mr. Henkel says he fought "like a lion" to gain admission to an economics university in Hamburg even though, at 19, he was too young (the minimum college admission age was 20). And at IBM, he says, he made the grade despite lacking the requisite university degree by using his powers of persuasion and performance at the assessment center. Yet even Mr. Henkel acknowledges that he did not grow up in underprivileged circumstances. When his father died, his mother successfully carried on the family business as a general agent for several paper manufacturers.
The careers of other leading German business executives prove that family background is not the be-all and end-all of getting on in German business. The head of DaimlerChrysler, Jürgen Schrempp, worked his way up to the top as the son of a clerical worker.
Mr. Hartmann is unperturbed by these exceptions to his rule. Many such people are specialists in corporate rescue bids, he says, people who take on the tough task of turning a failing company round and making it profitable again. In situations such as these, Professor Hartmann says, elite recruitment preferences are often thrown overboard. "That," he says, "is when you hire people with a reputation for being tough and for getting things done."
Are Germany's executive suites otherwise peopled by cliques? At Germany Inc., where board chairmen are frequently members of several supervisory boards, the people whom you know may well play a crucial role, Mr. Hartmann notes. At Commerzbank, the personnel department says that board members' children are only allowed to join the bank with the approval of the entire board, while the human resources director has to approve the hiring of senior executives' children. Yet at Commerzbank, it seems, they are happy to give the children of Dresdner Bank colleagues a chance.
Less senior executives are sometimes amazed at how close the contacts between senior executives are. "It really is remarkable when board members meet and you imagine they have never met before, but they immediately use each other's first names and start talking about their last golf tournament," one industrial executive recalls.
But Florian Schilling, Frankfurt bureau chief of personnel consultants Heidrick & Struggles, says he thinks the closed shop's days are numbered as globalization gains momentum. "Everything is growing more international and more transparent," he says. In many sectors, such as investment banking, he adds, it is also important to establish a reputation for being a go-getter. "There," he says, "all that counts is performance."
Mr. Hartmann, in contrast, paints a gloomier picture. Social background, he says, will grow increasingly important because senior management jobs are fewer and far between, and more and more Germans are going to college. The applicant's genealogy, he says, is the only distinguishing criterion that is left. But the worst career prospects, Professor Hartmann predicts, are not those of working-class male graduates but those of women graduates. Of the graduates in his survey, 4.2 percent are women, he says, and only four of them have made it to the top in business. "De facto, a woman stands no chance," Mr. Hartmann says. Not even when she has an upper middle-class background.