There ís nowhere like home, and the economic growth of the last few years made todayís Romania different from the Romania of the nineties: sufficient premises for a Romanian who left the country to want to come back. Still, the gap between reality and expectations of those who returned after a few years in London or on the Wall Street is still wide.

”If I did not leave the country on business trips once every few months, I think I would go crazy. This is my chance, being able to travel a lot,” Andreia Stavarache, 36, says frankly. She left for the United States through a programme of internship with audit and consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) at the beginning of 2000.

Stavarache had applied for an internship with PwC in Bucharest and had been turned down for being insufficiently experienced. “Those at Stamford, Connecticut, accepted me as a trainee for six months,” she recalls. What had started as a half-year internship was later extended by one year and, in mid 2001, the company hired her as a tax associate.

“When I returned, what I disliked most was the squalor and the “Romanian issues”: people, regardless of whether they have any money or not, complain. Romanians whine instead of looking for solutions. We want the idea to come up, to implement it and get results right away and always envy others for their success. We donít know how to apologize, nor say thank you,” Stavarache says.

The first and most abrupt difference for those that had management or senior positions at the offices abroad of major multinationals is how people work in Romania.

“In the States, they had some standards I donít see in Romania. Respect and attitude towards the client always came first,” Andreia Stavarache says. Any email from a client that the company received had to be answered within two or three hours at most; that was the organisationís policy with only one exception to it, which stipulated that the answer might be given in 24 hours if it needed thorough research. Even so, one still had to confirm the receipt of the message within three hours.

She believes that the idea of Romanians working harder than others is untrue. “They work at a crazy pace abroad. In Romania, there is no results-oriented management and employees follow the lead of the managers.”