The executive, too terrified to speak, bowed.
“I apologize to all my colleagues.”
“For the next ten, fifteen minutes, the CFO talked about whatever he
did and how bad it was and how damaging it was,” Skarzynski said.
The executive, shamed, scorned, and suffering a devastating loss of
face, sat down. The CFO then called on another executive. And he
proceeded with a similar self-criticism exchange.
“It went on for the most painful two hours,” Skarzynski said. Luckily,
he was never called on.
But the yelling and shaming of employees—this ingrained fear of
failure and loss of face—paid off for Samsung in its own way.
In his meetings with America’s carriers, K.T. had a chance to show off
the progress that he’d made with his phone developers.
K.T. and Skarzynski made a pitch to Sprint in 1999 over dinner in
Kansas City. K.T. began with a quality-control demonstration. He held up
Samsung’s latest flip phone for the Sprint executives. He attacked it, pulled
at it, tried to squeeze and twist the flip cover in every direction, struggling
to bend and break it. But he failed to do any serious damage. He even
dropped the phone on the floor and stomped on it. Then he picked it up and
made a call. And it worked. Then he turned to a Sprint engineer at the
table.
“Can I borrow your phone for a second?” he asked, reaching for the
engineer’s handset.
K.T. opened the flip, bent it, and broke it apart with the mere twist of a
hand before giving it back to the engineer.
“Can I see your Motorola phone?”
“You’re not gonna break this one, are you?”
K.T. took the phone and held it up to his face. The table was nervous.
“Motorola, get outta of here!” he shouted at the phone in his Korean
accent. He gave the phone back fully intact.
K.T. was an instant hit at Sprint; his relationship with Sprint soon
bordered on a bromance. Samsung invited Sprint CEO Ron LeMay and
Sprint PCS COO Len Lauer to South Korea for a grand tour of its factory
lines. After breakfast at the Shilla Hotel, they joined Pete in an entourage
of three limousines. With emergency lights flashing, “We had police
escorts, during rush hour, to stop traffic across the bridge and the streets