Why everything feels broken in Hungary?

I’ve had my share of bad luck recently, a leaking boiler, a dead car battery, and a fine. The boiler guy kept promising to come, but he never showed up. Another offered to replace it, but quoted an absurdly high price for a basic job. The car service — a well-known brand — tried to sell me a battery for twice the price listed in their own webshop and explained to me why it bills two full hours to replace it. Another garage had a fair price but didn’t have the part and couldn’t be bothered to pick it up from their competitor’s webshop. Meanwhile, the tax authority quietly fined me instead of sending one more reminder email, I simply forgot to submit some minor paperwork. Mistake on my part, sure, but also a system designed without a trace of empathy or user thinking. And the worst part? None of this is shocking. We all have stories like these. They’re not exceptions — they’re normal. We’ve built a country where the default setting is “not my problem,” and where the systems around us are built for compliance, not service.

Why don’t we see more global success stories born in Hungary? Why is it that even basic services feel like a never-ending uphill battle? Trains are unreliable, offices are impersonal, banks are slow and inflexible, and most “customer experiences” feel like a polite version of humiliation. And if you’ve ever dealt with public administration, you’ve probably come out feeling more like a humble subject than a citizen. And I’m not even getting into how neurodivergent people like myself struggle with this world. Maybe that’s a topic for another post.

But here’s the thing: the solution isn’t some unknown secret. The playbook for good service, smart leadership, and strong organizations already exists. We just don’t use it. Maybe because it challenges our instincts. Maybe because it demands we lead, not command. Maybe because it involves admitting we are wrong. Either way, we keep choosing the hard way, and we’re paying for it every single day. It’s a constant cycle of payback: today you ignore someone’s problem, tomorrow someone ignores yours.

The answer isn’t lack of money or brains. It’s not even corruption, although that certainly doesn’t help. The real issue is more invisible: a way of thinking that’s stuck in the past. A culture that hasn’t caught up with how great companies and institutions are built today. We’re still trying to run 21st-century services with 20th-century mindsets, and it shows.

But if the jerks are winning, why play nice? Because in the long run, treating people well isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s one of the smartest business decisions you can make. Great service builds trust, and trust turns into loyalty. It’s much cheaper to keep a satisfied customer than to chase new ones. And loyal customers tend to spend more, forgive more, and recommend more. In fact, good service is often the best kind of marketing. People share stories about how you helped them when you didn’t have to, or how your team went the extra mile, and those stories travel farther than any ad campaign ever could. It also helps you weather hard times: when the economy dips, customers stick with companies they believe in. Plus, a reputation for fairness and care makes hiring easier, as talented people want to work for brands they respect. And let’s not forget the bigger picture. You don’t live outside the system you’re helping shape. Sooner or later, you or your loved ones will be on the receiving end. Maybe it’s your parent at the clinic, your kid dealing with a government office, or you trying to get help from a support line or trying to get a new battery. Every shortcut, every careless decision, every “not my job” moment eventually circles back. Being a decent business isn’t just a business decision or a moral choice. It’s a way to make the system work better for everyone, including yourself.

It's good for society, it's good for business. Why don't we do it then? It’s tempting to blame this on a lack of funding, brain drain, or outdated infrastructure, and sure, those play a part. But the real problem runs deeper. What we’re facing is a cultural and psychological inertia: an outdated way of seeing not just organizations, leadership, and work, but first and foremost, people. It’s a mindset issue. Most companies, institutions, and public bodies here are still operating under assumptions that stopped working decades ago.

This mindset assumes that efficiency comes from control, that success comes from enforcing plans, and that people only work if they’re told what to do or for money. Leadership is still widely treated as a top-down function: the boss knows best, employees follow orders, and the only thing that matters is results, preferably financial ones. There’s no real connection to customers, no feedback loop from the people doing the work, and no belief that motivation, meaning, or autonomy could be part of the equation.

But this is where modern, high-performing organizations have already made the leap. They’ve discovered that in a world defined by complexity, unpredictability, and constant change, these traditional models simply don’t work. In fact, they actively cause harm. The best companies today are structured around strategic alignment, not control. That means aligning everyone, from leadership to interns, around shared goals, measurable outcomes, and a clear sense of purpose. It means empowering teams to make decisions, learn from feedback, and iterate fast, instead of waiting for approval to trickle down the chain of command.

In these environments, leaders don’t act as gatekeepers, they act as enablers. Their job is to remove friction, to coach instead of command, and to serve the team instead of being served by it. It sounds idealistic until you see it in action, and then you realize it’s not idealism, it’s necessity. Because when organizations are built on fear, bureaucracy, and rigid planning, they break the moment reality shifts, and reality always shifts.

What makes this transformation so hard is that it’s deeply counterintuitive. It goes against your first instinct or common sense. It seems wrong or illogical at first glance, even though it in fact works. For example, trusting teams with more freedom might feel unsettling, but it often leads to better discipline and results. It’s counterintuitive because our gut tells us control is safer, even when reality proves the opposite.

Most people believe that leadership means being in charge, not asking questions. They believe that control is safety. That planning is more valuable than learning. That being “the boss” means having all the answers. But none of these things hold up in a fast-moving, digital-first economy. They’re remnants of the industrial age, and they’re actively killing innovation.

The gap we see between Hungarian organizations and global players isn’t about money or talent. It’s about how work is structured, how decisions are made, and how people are treated. It’s about the absence of strategic alignment. When goals are unclear, teams pull in different directions, feedback gets ignored, and motivation fades. Without that alignment, even good people in good roles produce mediocre results. They’re grinding, not building. Surviving, not thriving. They make decisions out of fear instead of purpose, and those decisions are often radically different from what their bosses would actually appreciate.

That’s why the experience of “being a customer” here so often feels dehumanizing. Why services feel disjointed, awkward, or just plain slow and expensive. These aren’t failures of execution, they’re failures of design. You can’t layer digital tools on top of broken thinking and expect excellence. You can’t train your people to be polite while treating them like replaceable cogs. And you certainly can’t expect innovation to happen in a structure that punishes failure, ignores feedback, and rewards conformity.

There are, of course, exceptions. But they’re exceptions because they’ve broken with tradition, not because they’ve perfected it. They’ve realized that success in the modern world comes not from control, but from clarity, culture, and the willingness to rethink everything.

If you’re building something in this country, whether it’s a startup, a local service, or even a department inside a larger organization, ask yourself this: are you leading the way people expect, or the way your team actually needs? Are you aligned on strategy, or just aligned on avoiding risk and making money? Are you rewarding initiative, or compliance, or even ruthless profit making?

Because until we shift the way we think about leadership, alignment, and people, Hungary will keep missing the global stage, not for lack of brains or ambition, but because we’re trying to win tomorrow with yesterday’s rules.