Running a business isn’t a walk in the park. Running a digital marketing agency in Eastern Europe, while serving US and Canadian clients is far, far more challenging than anyone would have thought. In the early beginning of the business, I applied some Western ideas on managing the team, hoping I’m creating the perfect environment.
Boy was I wrong.
It turned out, you can’t copy-paste Western ideas on management, team dynamics, productivity improvements, and constructive feedback. The ideas were great, and they did work in Western settings. But in a Balkan setting, it ended up backfiring in the worst possible manner.
We lost clients, lost productivity, lost money…and eventually the entire staff fell apart.
What went wrong, I pondered. I did everything by the book. The books were all good. Why didn’t it work for me?
I realized that the cultural setting in Eastern Europe is far different than in the West. Moreover, the cultural forces in the Balkan is even more turbulent. How people viewed work, authority, reporting, checks and balances…. People saw all of these things as something negative. The philosophy of work here was that work is a curse, and you’re better off not working at work, but making sure you still get the full salary at the end of the month.
After about a year of deep research and reading, I packed together a series of lectures with a local NGO, LinkAcross (great guys). We grabbed the issue of work head on. The first seminar was a 3-day event, with 5 hour-long sessions of teaching, and perhaps another 5 hours of Q&A. The title: A privilege or a Curse – How our view on Work affects our careers and life.
We went on to have a few other seminars, and weekly workgroups around the material, in Skopje, Macedonia. Then, I shared a bit about this material with another NGO that is organizing camps on Economy, Diplomacy and Integrity in Croatia. I got an invitation to be the main speaker on their 20th anniversary gathering. It was a truncated version, of 2 one-hour lectures. On that event, we unknown to me, we had a representative from a Christian political party in the EU Parliament.
After the event was finished, we had a fancy dinner, and it so happened that I was at the same table with this lady, Adriana. We started talking about the material, and my business experience. It didn’t take long, and I got an invitation to visit the party in Brussels, the Washington DC of Europe. To present this material, and my business offerings to the political party.
So i did. It was a crazy-eery feeling to be walking through the EU buildings in Brussels… the same hallways and landmarks you only get to see on the news. I got to sit in the chairs of the EMPs, and I had the privilege to do my presentation in one of the fancy meeting halls in the parliament building.
We agreed that this Theology of Work is very much needed for all other christian political parties in Europe, and we decided to organize Study Days – events where we’d do trainings on several different topics, including theology of work, brand positioning, communication strategies, and digital marketing strategies.
That resulted with another invitation in the Netherlands, to talk to the local political party on how to have more effective pre-election campaigns. That resulted in a few interesting conversations, one of which was with a lady hoping to run for a seat in the Amsterdam municipal council.
It’s been a very interesting ride with this Theology of Work topic. What started as a greenhorn’s wishful thinking to introduce a Western work environment and the inevitable failure (that costed me $1.5M), ended up in me delivering lectures and communication presentations in Brussels.
Can’t make up such things even if you’d try.
We are still in the super-early stages of this work with European policy makers. But as one EMP explained on a plenary session during the European Prayer Breakfast (got invited on this event right after my talk in Croatia), EU is struggling with too many liberal ideas that are great on paper, but cause enormous suffering in real life. Christians have to find a way to speak truth to power, but in a congruent, intelligent, critical manner WITHOUT being rude and dismissive. It’s a tall order. But unless we find a way, the EU project will fall apart. Not because its roots were rotten. But despite its roots being deeply Christian. The devil is here to steal, kill, destroy.
The EU project was started out of a prayer meeting of 3 visionary leaders: Alcide DiGaspari, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer. Through communal prayer, these 3 leaders of Italy, France, and Germany respectively, agreed that we can’t afford to have another continent-wide war. We have to start uniting the continent, or risk obliteration. That vision started back in 1949, and has enabled the continent a period of peace and prosperity that has lasted for over 75 years now, enabling safety and flourishing to close to 450 million people.
Now, thanks to that expensive failed experiment, and a lot of research and teaching, I get the privilege of talking to the highest circles of decision makers in EU. Talking about the desperate and unavoidable need of a theologically soaked minds thinking together, so we’d avoid the highly polarized public argument between people blindly following religious ideologies versus people blindly fighting religion altogether.
If you’d want to participate…to partner with me in these high-level conversations, please spread the news, and make a donation.
