a merry funky business

I still wonder about what we should change regarding business strategies. As it seems, everyone goes with the flow and waits for tomorrow to deliver the next step. I have read analysis disclosed in April last year- when the C word ( crisis) dind’t start to pierce quite strong in Romania- analysis written by specialists from really reputed financial institutions which estimated a 2008 safe for eastern Europe against the US economy downturn ( due to the large economy and financial gap between the two continents ). As it turned, we, Eastern Europeans, we are even now damn “safe”. So, I wonder once again, what are books needed for right now? How do we make a proper business strategy when a fiscal code is largely disputed and controversial in its measures?

And, above everything, how can we trust anything around us? Even ourselves, or the closest ones. We just play check waiting for tomorrow to make its move and we do ours accordingly, without knowing if we have a really good check partner or we just play blind. How can we even trust Moody’s, Standard&Poor ratings, FMI strategically- given loan, without thinking that (and not corroborated with the mystically conspiracies’ fans) that these organizations are only created to serve well global interests of certain power state economies and mediate and correct what it doesn’t serve well for them. This doesn’t necessary leads to the strategies done for the sake of a human being, employee, SME, social state politics, NGO and so on. I just feel we are the same as in anthology, at the mercy of the all hundred of gods, except now these gods are living now in corporate business centers in the great business and financial capitals of the world. Some states understand and play safe against these strategies, they make good PR for themselves, they take what they need and furnish to their people the safe living, a decent one at least.

I look around myself to my people and to my government and I found myself once again hopeless. With a president clowning around among the officials gathered at UE-NATO summit, with most of our officials driving blind and clueless this state (which at certain points can be ruled as a business, isn’t it?) With a Pogea seen by incident in his car, readind a newspaper and wearing on a finger a large gold ring ( “ghiul” it is called in Romania) and as I googled it, there are so many others with the same tastes in accessoring their incompetence. With Republic of Moldavia thrown once again in the communism nightmare. With TV news lacking any news at all, with the same figures quoted and analyzed and followed day after day after day …

My Delia said recently “all the bad news which makes me uncomfortable come from Romania). Sure, her roots are Romanians, otherwise, the bad news would have come from Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland. Why, though, I have this feeling that, except Romania, those other news wouldn’t have been equally cheap bad and sad-given as Romania’s?

Someone asked me in the recent past to write a short fragment regarding Romania’s state of the nation . I ignored the invitation, I found myself too bitter and too disappointed to wash the dirty clothes and write about it in a foreign magazine. I am not a patriot, not at all, not in the sense that I would give my life for something so abstract as “country”. But I played dead because I had nothing to comment on a very bad general situation.

Now about PR: I have read an interview with a PR representative which uttered the request for journalists to ask about “good things” happening in a company also and not only the “superficial bad and front page-titled news”. I wonder about this too: Should I write about a company’s new products or about how many people left that company without jobs? Can you be on Prozac in the mid of this bad news storm which surrounds us? How can I help a company to increase profits and make more money and also make sure that, my PR is resulting in hiring people again? When every big company comes in Romania for cheap labor force, let’s be honest about this, for the god’s sake. (I have examples, very certain, very clear and very non-PR). We call it strategy – when you keep profits high with the costs of cutting budgets from everything, from people to technology.

Research: a friend of mine was complaining last week that the budget for research has been cut to something above zero and his wife, a physician PhD ( also in the past, this budget had 0.13/ .118/ 0.54 from GDP) has troubles at work. When did Romania invested in something else which doesn’t make money today? Everyone talks about how speculative in Romania’s economy. Yes, but who let the speculators and the speculative investments occur? When did Romania, as a state, have a strategy, of any kind?

History insert: I know that we begged for Churchill and Roosevelt to save us from soviets and they thought better and said no. Sharply.

We speculate anything and everything and we are clowning in Europe and abroad. We send officials for European parliament which doesn’t know to define what the NATO abbreviation means. Lately, we encourage for self-developing a young lady which knows better to wear a Louis Vuitton than reading a single fragment of an economy treat. The sole names I heard around and which accomplished to gain a certain respect among the social common and average conscience are those of Raed from Smurd and Razvan Ungureanu. Even them are widely discussed, as everyone in this world.

So, what is funky about doing business in Romania? And how two Swedish academicians (and some of us know about How Sweden relates to social system if not overall business) can teach or mark a single good idea in their books, to be applied in state where every company speculates the profits done already yesterday?

I think we have to wait for some new books to be written, once the world starts to cure again. The systems- financial and economics – will be back on track not starting tomorrow, but on the basis of a continuous transformation until they get that shape which functions ( hopefully). And only then I will start to read another economy book or care for an MBA degree which now only teaches me the wrong economy lessons.