of chairman without blundering.
“The whole room would stand up and clap and bow and things like that
as he would make his way to his seat,” Pete Skarzynski told me.
“He’s the chairman’s son. He would be your future boss someday.”
An eager learner, Jay rarely made direct, substantive statements;
instead, he chose his words carefully and asked a lot of questions.
“He’s sort of like a god inside the company,” said former senior vice
president for content and services Daren Tsui, who met with him four
times. “Every little thing that he does is analyzed, and it becomes basically
an edict right away.” Fortune reported that when he doled out mild criticism
about Samsung’s television marketing efforts in early 2015, “thirty-year
veteran Park Gwang-gi, an executive vice president and the unit’s head of
strategic marketing, was said to be so rattled by Lee’s criticism that he
immediately resigned his position.”
Reserved and dapper, Jay sat on the board of directors of the new
television display venture with Sony. He spoke eloquently and, in public,
almost always appeared in a conservative suit and thin-rimmed spectacles.
“He’s exactly the kind of guy you would want running your company,” said
Peter Weedfald, who made presentations to the future chairman in New
York. “He handled himself with poise in front of people like Colin Powell
and Rudy Giuliani. It was impressive.”
Kang Tae-in (T.J.), former senior vice president at Samsung’s Media
Solution Center, said of Jay: “I had the impression that Jay Y. is probably
more of an introvert than an extrovert....But I think through training and
education he’s able to turn on and display leadership quality.”
“He’s nice,” another South Korean mobile employee at Samsung told
me, “but he doesn’t have the charisma of his father.”
It was a sentiment that was repeated to me by a dozen South Koreans
who met him.
Growing up under the tutelage of Japanese and English teachers, Lee
was a sportsman, equestrian, and polyglot. He studied East Asian history at
Seoul National University, South Korea’s equivalent of Harvard, which
gave him the foundation in arts and letters favored by Samsung’s ruling
family. Jay continued his studies and received an MBA at Japan’s Keio
University, where he studied Japanese business history and practices. There
he wrote his thesis on the Japanese currency, the yen, and the role of its
sharply rising value in the 1980s boom and the subsequent decline of Japan.