“He put a slogan up in front of the room that said something like ‘We
only want young and energetic people in Samsung,’ ” recalled Skarzynski.
“Dale, take it down,” a human resources employee urged him, worried
about a discrimination complaint.
But Dale was equally hard on himself. He devoured books on leadership
and practiced a sort of personal asceticism, denying himself the typical
luxuries of a Samsung CEO.
He was also unusually accessible. He occasionally dropped in to the
cafeteria—an unthinkable act for a South Korean CEO—to ask about life
in America. His office was “right beside everyone else’s offices along the
hallway where everybody walked,” said a marketer. “If you wanted to talk
to Dale, you could just go in there and talk to him.” The Americans who
took to Dale confided in him. And since, as a Korean, he had access to the
opaque and all-powerful Samsung headquarters, they would depend on him
over the course of the Apple wars to come.
—
WHEN DALE PUT OUT a call for a new chief marketing officer, a
headhunter zeroed in on Todd Pendleton. Pendleton had been an
unconventional marketer at Nike, an impresario and master brand builder.
He had been offbeat and irreverent in the ads he crafted and sharp and to
the point in the way he communicated.
When Todd received the call, he wasn’t aware that Samsung even made
smartphones. But he flew out to Las Vegas in February of 2011 to meet
Dale at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where Samsung frequently
wowed the industry with large booths that dominated the conference hall.
“I was very impressed,” Pendleton said. “I think the quality of the
products, the big screen, things that I hadn’t seen before were very
intriguing.”
Apple didn’t have a booth at CES. But outside the CES walls, it was a
vastly more respected company among the public.
Coming off a fifteen-year career of excellence at Nike, Todd could
have stayed on at Nike in comfort. But he was getting bored. He wanted to
do something new.
“It was a dream job,” he said of Nike. But at Samsung, he claimed,
“there was no place to go but up.” At a company run by engineers, his goal