was right. Gordon and James were scheduled to depart, but Miky asked
them to stay longer to help implement the chairman’s vision.
“Miky insisted that Miho and I become chairs of the new in-house
design school,” Bruce said, “which was now under construction and would
be called the Innovative Design Laboratory of Samsung (IDS).”
At first they resisted. It would mean running an institute in a country far
from home where they didn’t know the language.
“We thought about it. We realized that Samsung was an influential
company,” Bruce said. “If we were patient, we knew Samsung could make
a big ripple.”
So the two went back to Miky and accepted her offer to run IDS.—
BRUCE SETTLED INTO HIS new office inside the half-constructed building,
set to open in the coming months, and peered out the window into the
urban expanse. The autumn sky was grimy, with a grayish-yellow color, the
“yellow dust,” as Koreans call it, that swept in from the Mongolian desert
each spring.
He daydreamed about riding on the steppes with the hordes of Kublai
Khan as they advanced southward through Asia, and then westward to
eastern Europe, redefining the known world. Daydreaming was a designer’s
inspiration.
The cracking and clawing of machines jolted him back to reality. A
construction worker was spraying lacquer onto the metal-paneled walls. A
sickening, pungent odor drifted through the room, where it was breathed in
by the staff and hovered over a small fortune’s worth of computer
equipment.
This was the Samsung Way, Bruce thought. Move fast, cut corners.
His mandate was to teach good design principles to Samsung. But the
confusion, chaos, and last-minute construction of IDS was deafening his
thoughts as Samsung prepared to open the lab. It was hardly a place for
contemplation, solitude, and exercising the creative imagination.
Bruce decided to work from his apartment in Seoul. He had promised
to give Samsung his best shot, but as he prepared to start design classes, he
realized that reforming Samsung was going to be far more challenging than
he had anticipated.