“He didn’t come really to the office for about a year and a half,” said his
aide Hwang Young-key. But he began showing up more often in 1990.
“Do you know,” he asked a group of his executives, attempting to make
a point, “how many kernels of rice there are in a single piece of sushi?”
They had no idea.
“Two hundred and fifty,” he said. A master sushi chef, explained the
chairman, reaches into his rice bowl and takes out exactly two hundred and
fifty kernels of rice, “perhaps eight out of ten times,” he said, according to
Hwang.
The chairman was referring to the mastery of the shokunin, a master
craftsman of Japan who seeks erudition through repetition. Lee urged his
executives to think like that.
“Seeing the same movie ten times, you think that’s not possible,” he told
his executives. “I think that it’s interesting. If you see the movie for the first
time, you know the story and you know the leading actor, maybe the
leading actress. The second time, you see the extras or supporting actors,
maybe three or five supporting actors’ roles. Then you see it three times,
you see the decorations. The cars on the streets, the buildings on the back
side, you see other sides.”
But even ten times is not enough to get inside the head of the director,
the chairman explained. And that should be the ultimate goal of the viewer
who wants to truly understand the film.
“Whenever [Lee] said something, he had a message,” said Hwang.
In 1991 the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And Lee
realized, in the isolation of his home, that Samsung was failing to keep up
with the emerging global boom.
“Even in such a situation, there was no sense of urgency at Samsung,”
Lee II wrote. The company was floundering under the mistaken belief that
Samsung was number one in its field.
The chairman knew that was ominous. According to a booklet Samsung
published about his thinking, a century earlier Korea’s leaders had tried to
hunker down in their isolated feudal kingdom, resisting the arrival of
foreigners (and even executing some), only to have their kingdom pried
open like oysters by gunboats and then annexed by Japan into a half century
of colonialism.
The world was reliving such a moment, Lee was convinced. Borders