photo of Jobs on his desk as a reminder of his mission.
“Yes, I think I can.”
“What would you need? And how long would it take?” Because Apple
was an important Samsung customer, the executives at headquarters were
pushing for a cautious approach. They wanted to take down each
competitor, from HTC to Motorola to BlackBerry to Apple, one by one
over the next five years.
“No, no,” Wallace said. “We don’t need to do that.” Approaching the
whiteboard with a marker in hand, Wallace proposed his own version of
Samsung’s strategy.
“I’m a rather petite Canadian,” he said. “So one of my biggest fears is
going to prison.” If you want to up your chances of survival, you don’t
punch the second-, third-, and fourth-biggest guys in the room. “You punch
the biggest guy in the face, because that’s your statement of intent. That’s
what we have to do with Apple.”
Something lit up in Dale’s face, Wallace recalled.
“Okay. What do you say?” he said. “Want to come here and beat
Apple?”
Wallace appreciated the seriousness and outlandish goals of Samsung,
as well as the energy of its American CEO. He was also happy to hear that
Nike marketer Todd Pendleton was joining soon. So Wallace next called
his wife.
“You know how we were going to move to either Chicago or
California?” he said. “I think I’m gonna say yes to this job in Richardson,
Texas.”
His colleagues at BlackBerry couldn’t believe Dale’s decision.
“That’s such a step down,” said one, referring to Samsung. Little did
they understand that it was their company that was facing collapse.
—
“OH MY GOD, THERE’S this jalopy of a marketing department here,”
Wallace said to Todd Pendleton on day one, when he joined Pendleton a
couple weeks later, in June. The marketing department was, in Wallace’s
words, “dejected, beat up,” and a “black hole” with “no respect in the
organization. No respect amongst themselves.” The average turnover time
for a marketing executive at Samsung Mobile in the Texas office was seven