Chapter 4: Can Seam Work in Ukraine?

Very often at conferences, people ask us whether SEAM will work in a different culture. And, while the SEAM people say that there is no cultural variance here, SEAM can work anywhere, we had some doubt. We started actually with a research question, can SEAM work in Ukraine? You probably followed the news in Ukraine, something awful is happening there and the biggest thing about Ukraine is it’s very corrupt. We talked to companies in two different parts of Ukraine and came to a conclusion that actually surprised us. I realize that geography is not a strength of many Americans, so we just wanted to show the map of Ukraine (see Figure 4.1). You see here, the river of Dnieper and it divides Ukraine. One case study comes from Kyiv, the capital in the center, and one from Lviv, near the Polish border. In the east are Crimea and the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russian army is invading, although Russia pretends this is not happening.