In Nepal, the Real Meeting Happens in the Corridor After the Meeting. In Madagascar, It Happens Whenever It Happens.

🇳🇵 Nepal · 🇲🇬 Madagascar

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Nepali corporate culture has a meeting problem: the official one, in the conference room, is often where decisions get announced, not made — the actual deciding happened earlier, informally, among the people with standing to decide. Madagascar has a different problem entirely, captured in one phrase every visitor learns fast: mora mora, "slowly, slowly." The meeting will happen. So will the decision. Your deadline is a Western import, and it shows.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇵 Nepal

🇲🇬 Madagascar

Nepal

Nepali corporate culture runs on a layer of informal authority that sits just underneath the formal org chart, and learning to read it is most of what it takes to function there. A 30-year corporate veteran writing for a Nepali HR publication described the dynamic bluntly: "Meetings sometimes become a place where decisions are presented rather than formed," with the actual deciding happening earlier, in corridor conversations and informal gatherings among people with standing. Credit for work tends to flow upward toward senior staff even when junior employees did the substantive labor, and open disagreement with authority — particularly in the family- or promoter-owned firms that make up a large share of Nepali business — is culturally uncomfortable enough that professionals who challenge decisions directly risk real isolation.

Influence itself is personal and relationship-coded rather than purely structural: some people accumulate power through assertive dominance, others through patient relationship-building, others through quiet, consistent reliability, and reading which style a given manager or colleague runs on is treated as a genuine professional skill. One Expat.com forum thread discussing Nepali work culture surfaced a blunter set of practical concerns for foreign workers specifically — persistent prejudice along nationality and caste lines, limited legal protection for outsiders, and infrastructure friction (power cuts reportedly running up to 21 hours a day during the dry season in some areas) that shapes the working day as much as any cultural norm does.

Madagascar

Malagasy business culture is built around fihavanana — a foundational social value, closer to an obligation than a preference, that extends family-like treatment outward from blood relatives to in-laws, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. In practice, this means relationship-building isn't a soft prerequisite to business in Madagascar, it's close to the entire mechanism: deals get finalized over long lunches because, as etiquette guides note, "professionals prioritize relaxation then," and maintaining a business relationship can mean scheduling purely social visits and reaching out on holidays with no transactional purpose attached.

Pace is the other defining feature, and it has its own name: mora mora, "slowly, slowly," a cultural orientation toward unhurried patience that extends from daily life straight into decision-making and deadlines. Guides for newcomers describe it as genuinely relaxing once internalized, but openly acknowledge it "can be frustrating for those accustomed to a faster pace of life" — a polite way of saying that a Western-style hard deadline and a Malagasy sense of urgency are often operating on different clocks entirely. Negotiation follows a related logic: initial prices, especially quoted to foreigners, are commonly inflated, and showing some resistance or disapproval is expected and even necessary to signal that real bargaining can begin.

The Reckoning

Neither Nepal nor Madagascar has an individually published Hofstede score — both sit outside the original 76-country study, a gap not uncommon among smaller South Asian and East African economies, and worth noting honestly rather than papering over with an invented number. Comparative academic work that has applied Hofstede's methodology to Nepal (notably studies benchmarking it against India and the US) consistently finds a high-power-distance, collectivist profile, which tracks closely with the corridor-politics dynamic described above: decisions concentrate with those who hold informal standing, and the formal meeting ritual exists partly to preserve that standing publicly. Madagascar's fihavanana-centered culture suggests an even more relationally dense collectivism, where the "hierarchy" that matters most often runs through kinship-like obligation rather than organizational rank.

The practical contrast for a newcomer: Nepal's informality is about where power actually sits, which a careful observer can learn to map. Madagascar's informality is about time itself moving differently, which no amount of organizational chart-reading will speed up — fihavanana and mora mora aren't obstacles to the "real" business process, they are the business process.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

thehrmnepal.com (named opinion) — Raju Bhetwaal, describing three decades in Nepali corporate life, wrote that formal meetings are "sometimes... a place where decisions are presented rather than formed," and that professionals who build quiet, consistent credibility through repeated small ethical actions tend to earn lasting trust — even though that path to advancement is typically slower than rising through political proximity to power.

Expat.com Nepal forum — Posters discussing work culture for a foreign (Indian) professional flagged genuine prejudice along nationality and caste lines as a real workplace dynamic, alongside blunt practical friction — power cuts reportedly running up to 21 hours a day in the dry season — that shapes daily working conditions as much as any formal cultural norm.

madaliving.com (cultural blog) — A piece explaining fihavanana described it as extending family-like obligation outward to colleagues and acquaintances, illustrated by the valin-tanana ("hand return") tradition of collective, reciprocal labor — and quoted a local proverb capturing its weight relative to money: "one prefers losing money than losing fihavanana."

Conclusion

If you're moving into Nepali corporate life, invest early in learning who actually holds informal sway — the org chart will mislead you, and the real meeting is the one that happens after the scheduled one ends. If you're moving into Malagasy corporate life, budget real time for relationship-building before you budget time for the deal itself, and recalibrate your sense of urgency, because mora mora isn't a bug in the system, it is the system.

The honest version: in Nepal, figure out who's really in the room. In Madagascar, figure out that there's no rush to find out.