When he showed the concept to his managers, his boss said, “You can
talk to people on a phone. Why do you need to send a text message?” When
the project was quickly shut down, Ted quit.
“You can’t quit,” his boss told him. “We invested millions of dollars in
you.”
But quit he did. He went on to become a design professor at
Metropolitan State University of Denver, a role that gave him the freedom
to create his own design philosophy.
In fact, lifelong Samsung managers did not take kindly to this new
generation of freer spirits Samsung had hired and trained.
“Miho and I were becoming disliked because we were changing the
culture,” Gordon Bruce said.
As the pair continued to lecture at IDS, Miky Lee made an ominous
move affecting their design operation.
After Samsung’s deal with Steven Spielberg broke down, Miky invested
$300 million in DreamWorks on behalf of the CJ Group, the food
conglomerate run by her rival arm of the Samsung family. She would use
this access to turn CJ into a serious movie producer in South Korea.
Employees received training from DreamWorks filmmakers, and CJ
distributed Spielberg’s films in South Korea.
CJ’s food business was a far cry from the film business, but this was
how South Korea’s sprawling chaebol groups often worked, expanding into
whatever industries interested their ruling families and might grow their
profits.
CJ was still tied to the greater Samsung Group through a complex web
of cross-shareholdings. But Samsung and CJ were completing a break from
each other through a series of share swaps and sales, giving Miky and her
side of the Lee family (descendants of Chairman Lee II’s older, estranged
brother) more freedom to act without Chairman Lee’s approval, completing
the inheritance process. Now CJ would stand on its own.
Miky’s DreamWorks deal “was like slapping the chairman in the face,”
Gordon Bruce said. “Our connection to Chairman Lee evaporated as Miky
—our conduit to the chairman—was banished from the IDS picture.”
On her own, Miky would live out her dreams to promulgate Korean
culture globally, going on to enormous success in her new production
house, CJ Entertainment, releasing in 2000 one of South Korea’s first
megablockbusters, Joint Security Area, a story about North and South