Olympics, slapped on televisions and handsets all over the world.
Before long, Samsung would supply one in three of the world’s
smartphones.
When you enter Samsung’s headquarters, you enter a fortress. Few gain
access to its inner sanctum. Its leaders avoid publicity and usually don’t
have Twitter accounts. But in my reporting, I had managed to build a
degree of trust with its executives, and I was allowed inside its sleek, glossy
office towers and able to tour its laboratories, where scientists and
engineers tested ideas that most consumers could only imagine. Young
designers told me about smartphones and TV concepts they were working
on that I didn’t believe could possibly land on the market in a few years.
But they did. I met visionaries and dreamers, people whom the company
billed as stars.
But there was something different about Samsung. As people there
boasted about their achievements, they’d transition to something, well,
unusual for a Fortune 100 technology giant.
“The founder had a vision in his mind to create a new world. We are
moving into the dream and vision of the founder,” declared Gil Young-
joon, senior vice president at Samsung’s ultrasecretive research institute,
the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). We were in the
middle of a conversation about foldable smartphones, a far-off idea at the
time but one unveiled almost nine years later, in February 2019.
“He wanted to make another miracle,” Gordon Kim, human resources
director, told me as he went through the biography of B.C. Lee’s son,
Chairman Lee Kun-hee. “Three hundred and forty hours of speech he
delivered. How can he talk for three hundred and forty hours? It’s
incredible.” Employees, to my amazement, could recite the exact dates of
his historic speeches.
I had already realized that Samsung didn’t want me getting anywhere
near its ruling family when I made the grave error of asking for an
interview.
I was quickly told that this “will not be possible” by the rep from
Samsung’s PR agency, Weber Shandwick. “I am dealing with a variety of
sensitivities that you would have no idea of.” And yet it was Samsung that
had invited me on the trip.
But as I continued to research Samsung, the stories of the chairman
became ever more surprising.