>I have a very good friend who lives in Romania. We often exchange email and discuss life in our respective countries. His accounts of life before and after the fall of the USSR were eye openers. In a previous post you mentioned something that he did also... to find out what they thought about things the managers would always go to those above... There was always someone at the top who's mind wasn't made up by asking someone above. He was usually the one who "pulled the trigger" in more ways than one.

I've been travelling a lot to Hungary and Romania - while they were the countries of so-called "real socialism" (we were always treated as some sort of renegade country, because we didn't recognize the supreme rule of USSR). At some point my passport was nearly full of Romanian stamps, and I knew all the good parking places around Timi?oara. We went shopping there, and did some smalltime smuggling, just like pretty much anybody else in the border area. This was still Ceau?escu's times, late 70s.

Often a shop would be closed, and there would be a note in the door "preluam marfa", or in bad Serbian "preuzmem roba" - "(I am) receiving the commodities". This meant the shop manager went to some central warehouse to get a shipment, and the shop was closed. Probably didn't trust the employees, as they could steal something in his absence. It was quite common, any shop could be closed at any time.

While working in Hungary, I was warned by a friend who was already working there, that most of the people still expect someone above to do the thinking for them. They have lost the initiative, and a whole culture of not sticking your neck out was developed. In the years of real-socialism any initiative was frowned upon, and many an inventive guy was crushed this way or other. We weren't immune to that, either, but our version of it was much, much softer, and we could travel as we liked. At some point we had about one million people (out of 20) who were working abroad, mostly in Germany, France, Sweden and Netherland. In mid-90s we already had some five years of transition, about 30% of the economy was in private hands, and we did have a market of this sort or other since mid 60s, and have survived the incredible inflation of 1993. That experience made our skills very marketable in Hungary - we had to learn to be quick to survive - and we had learned the value of quick decisions, reassembling the business model on-the-fly and other survival tricks. The Hungarian transition was too smooth, they never needed that.

You may just imagine the series of cultural shocks I experienced here - American banks are just friggin slow, almost as slow as Hungarian, even though they have about ten times better equipment. Colleges have everything you need on their websites, great, I wish we had that - but processing any paperwork inside them takes an incredible amount of time, regardless. In too many cases even simple things can't be done without the approval of this or that manager, who is absent at the moment, or can't be disturbed while on an important meeting... which is just another way to suppress initiative in the lower ranks. And so on...

(Just noticed that I said "initiative" where American English would use "incentive". Imagine a search/replace was done.)