South Korea and Japan as “low-trust societies.” I found that to be true.
Korean businesspeople joked to me that they needed to document “every
paperclip.”
“I’m thinking we are gonna be heroes,” Wallace told me. “[Lee] sits
there quietly, listening to this presentation. I’m showing him the social
media metrics on the projector screen. I thought I was killing it and he’d be
so impressed.”
D.J. sat with a stony expression, saying nothing. Then he pulled out a
marker.
“He starts telling us a story about this marketing organization in Russia
that they had to audit. It turned out...they were corrupting the data and
buying the results,” Brian said. That was all D.J. said in response to the
presentation. Brian was dumbfounded.
“I think he’s accusing me of being corrupt,” he said, leaning over to a
colleague.
The reality? How successful was the new campaign? As Business
Insider’s Steve Kovach reported, “The US team was outperforming
Samsung’s headquarters in South Korea, and other international offices
were itching to adopt ‘The Next Big Thing’ in their respective countries.”
Nonetheless, the more successful Pendleton and his team were, the
more complicated their relationship became with Samsung’s headquarters,
as a number of the team members recalled.
Todd Pendleton was unable to make the trip to South Korea for
Samsung’s global marketing meeting. Instead, Brian Wallace and five other
American marketing executives were dispatched to the Suwon headquarters
to listen to a series of inspirational speeches and, they thought, receive
awards.
The Samsung auditorium was filled with several hundred marketers and
executives. Wallace was convinced that the team was going to receive an
award of some sort for the success of their marketing efforts in the United
States. And indeed, the executives on the stage had a special
announcement. They asked the American team to stand up.
“The [Korean] executives told the employees [in the auditorium] to clap
for the US team as encouragement since they were the only group failing
the company, even though it was clear to everyone the opposite was true,”
Business Insider reported.
It was a Samsung ritual that I’d heard recounted by countless Samsung