military dress of a French musketeer—a cheerleader uttered a battle cry:
“Youth with boiling blood, conquer the summer season!”
The phrase PRIDE IN SAMSUNG was hoisted on a banner on a nearby hill
amid the pine trees and fertile summer grass. Amid a sea of blue costumes
and yellow capes, the recruits on the field smartly fell into formation in the
shape of a trapezoid. Senior employees watched from the sidelines, behind
the cheerleader, their company division identified by their color of dress.
“Victorious fighting spirit! Sensational telecommunications, team C!”
the cheerleader shouted. She jumped in the air, then flung her right arm
out, ruffles on her wrists, and snapped a forefinger in a white glove.
“Start!”
The day’s recruits were the newest class to enter the gates of this silicon
castle, at an event called the Samsung Summer Festival. They’d been
preparing to join the knighthood of Samsung Men and Women for more
than two weeks. They’d been through boot camps, hiked, and suffered sleep
deprivation while learning to work together and treat each other as family.
Four Samsung recruiting divisions performed that day, each wearing its
own distinct uniform, in what was meant to be a team-building exercise. It
was meant to be fun. But the company elite were watching.
A trumpet blared over the stadium’s loudspeakers, followed by the
strike of a guitar chord and patriotic cries from the recruits. Choreographed
to look like a human LED screen, they raised their colored placards in
unison, creating a sea of red. A small group flipped their cards to yellow,
creating the image of a digital watch display, counting down the seconds
and milliseconds: 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00. The regiment dropped to the grass
and flipped their cards in flawless unison back to blue, then snapped up into
a standing position with the precision of a Super Bowl halftime show. They
formed an animation of a soccer player sprinting and kicking a ball,
followed by the word “goal.” The soccer player then leaped in victory.
Next the recruits formed the letters “DMB” (digital multimedia
broadcasting). The technology behind the world’s first service that allowed
you to watch TV on your mobile phone, developed in South Korea and
kicked off the previous year, one of the myriad inventions to come out of
Korea.
The Samsung recruits had reason to be proud; their country and, even
more, their company had created it. The recruits broke formation and
sprinted outward to form a rectangle, picking up bags at their feet to create