Cultural resistance to professional culture

Five cents buys you nothing in Bablion.

Eastern Europe and India seemed promising low labor cost markets for technology. But no one knew about the other side of the coin.

Extreme Ways

Like India and Asia, Romania is attractive to outsourcers and offshoring as it has a reputation for a low cost labor force. What the nice business magazine writers don’t tell you is the cultural difference can be a major challenge. A common problem in the Romanian workplace is the “I gotta be me” attitude. It’s a bad attitude that I imagine comes out of the MTV’s trashcan culture and the mis-translation of hippie ideology about being true to yourself. And even the hippie’s were confused about what is true, what we are and what we must do.

So the whole mess just gets worse in the Romanian translation. This is not good for foreign investors and it’s really bad for those already on the ground who lack an iron will and a doubley clever pitchfork.