family, and family was company.
A “Samsung Man” commanded respect in Korea as a genteel and
hardworking husband.
“Samsung treats you the best. Thus, you are the best,” a company motto
declared, instilling a sense of corporate pride.
Taking a cue from the Japanese, B.C. formed a powerful human
resources department at Samsung, giving it a privileged position among his
Samsung Group affiliates.
“HR actually is the leading department, the leading function,” a senior
human resources executive at Samsung told me. “The role of HR is very
different from, let’s say, Western companies.” The role of the department
similar to HR in East Asia, even before industrial times and Samsung, “was
really to help the emperors to select and evaluate and appoint government
officials, as well as to train and inculcate Korean ideals in its recruits.”
“They said nunchi is important to succeed in Samsung,” said former
product manager Scott Seungkyu Yoon, who was trained in 2010. Nunchi is
the Korean art of gauging others’ moods, even if the other person says
nothing. Unlike America’s talkative, more straightforward business culture,
B.C. made Samsung a place of terse and sparse communications. You had
to feel out your boss’s emotions. To survive, you had to master nunchi.
—
THE KOREAN WAR CAME to a halt with a cease-fire in 1953. Though the
fighting was finished, the war never formally ended, since neither side
signed a peace treaty. More than 36,000 American servicemen and 5
million Koreans were killed, making it one of the deadliest civil wars of the
twentieth century, on par with the Vietnam War.
At the time, the West did not view South Korea as a country with a
great deal of promise. Its GDP was about the size of Sudan’s. When the
South Korean government attempted economic planning, the International
Monetary Fund derided its thinking as absurd. It had virtually no natural
resources. Its communist cousin, North Korea, was faring better, itching for
the chance to conquer its vulnerable cousin.
Snobbish stereotypes toward Koreans were especially prevalent in
Japan, where the country’s now-liberated Korean slave laborers were denied
citizenship.