Samsung Rising

was set up on the roof of Chairman Lee’s home, many assumed to monitor the home of Chairman Lee’s estranged elder brother’s fami ...

“MY NICKNAME IS ‘THE silent one,’ ” the new chairman of Samsung admitted. “At home, I’m known as the person who’s no fun.” He ha ...

“After returning to Korea [from Japan], I enrolled in middle school,” Lee wrote about his childhood. “At the time, anti-Japanese ...

had gotten a vasectomy after his fourth child with his wife, making such claims impossible. “He was on drugs,” Henry told me. He ...

“He didn’t come really to the office for about a year and a half,” said his aide Hwang Young-key. But he began showing up more o ...

were opening, trade was increasing, and South Korea, still on an isolated peninsula, was once again vulnerable to getting squash ...

Glorious Chairman! IN FEBRUARY 1993, CHAIRMAN Lee II gathered his executives for a conference in Los Angeles at the Century Plaz ...

“The chairman [asked] some incisive questions and the Japanese designers frantically replied to all of them,” Fukuda told the Jo ...

more times. He handed his executives the report and told them to read it and answer his question by the time they landed in Germ ...

We made our way downstairs through the lobby, decorated in the fashion of a Bavarian hunting lodge. Our guide opened the doors t ...

a day, he expounded on his new philosophy and strategy, barely pausing to use the restroom. Executives were given box lunches an ...

Church of Samsung THE CHAIRMAN WAS BUILDING a quasi-religious corporate culture, what South Koreans called “emperor management.” ...

points leaped out at me that seemed to define the chairman’s philosophy: 1. Healthy paranoia and a disdain for complacency, to s ...

The chairman instituted a 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. workday to improve his employees’ quality of life—rather than having them work ...

BUT WHILE THE CHAIRMAN promulgated an image within the company as a globally minded leader, behind the scenes he perpetuated a d ...

DIAGRAM DESIGNED BY GORDON BRUCE AND JON CRAINE. USED WITH PERMISSION. Samsung’s ownership structure. Samsung’s theme park, Ever ...

expansion, eager to make his mark. “On June 7th, 1993, a meeting was convened in Frankfurt, Germany,” the chairman wrote. “This ...

Go West, Young Heir CHAIRMAN LEE II NEEDED an emissary to the rest of the world on Samsung’s behalf. He turned to his beloved ni ...

“[Tomio] had been at Donna Karan, where I was doing advertising work,” advertising guru Peter Arnell told me from his scenic vil ...

told Adweek in 1996, referring to his early creative thinking for Samsung. Speaking to me more than twenty years later, he was p ...