ambushed them several times, forcing them to solve games and puzzles on
the spot.
“Find a living thing and bring it to me,” the unit leader told the
engineers. But there were almost no animals to be seen in the brown, barren
mountainscape.
The men searched the area and turned up nothing. So Nam-yoon and his
team pulled from their lunch box a dried anchovy, a common Korean side
dish. They put it in a cup of water and handed it to their commander.
“It was alive a moment ago when we first caught it,” they told him.
Clearly they had come up with a creative solution, which was the point
of the test.
“All right, pass!” the manager said, laughing.
As the sun rose, the tired platoon descended the mountain into
Samsung’s new assembly line. Each of the hikers wrote a declaration and
signed it.
“If Samsung does it, it’ll be successful,” Nam-yoon wrote, signing his
name to the pledge.
At 7:00 A.M. the engineers clocked in, showered, and put on fresh
clothes. Without having slept the night before, they worked until eleven
o’clock that night.
“We treated it like any other workday,” he said.
It was a historic moment. Samsung christened its first semiconductor
fabrication plant in 1983. The company had built it in only six months,
rather than the industry standard of three years. “A visitor to the Samsung
plant must navigate the rough, narrow streets in the village of Giheung.
Traffic is often clotted, as farmers driving rice cultivators vie for space
with trucks carrying multimillion-dollar shipments of semiconductors,”
wrote journalist Mark Clifford, an early visitor to the site. It wasn’t much to
look at.
What drove them?
“The thought of going bankrupt,” said former Samsung Electronics
CEO Lee Yoon-woo, back then a manager at the fabrication plant.
The Samsung engineers were granted limited access to Micron, an
Idaho-based chip maker, for technology training. Micron was in financial
trouble and was willing to license its technologies for a fee. But the
American engineers banned the Korean engineers from touching the