a day, he expounded on his new philosophy and strategy, barely pausing to
use the restroom. Executives were given box lunches and sandwiches to get
through the day.
“Change everything except your wife and children,” he said, using a
phrase that became his motto. Samsung called his philosophy “perpetual
crisis.”
The “Frankfurt Declaration,” as these three days came to be called by
those inside Samsung, became part of company lore, invoking his father’s
“Tokyo Declaration” a decade earlier.
The speeches were “absolutely unexpected by anybody, including
myself,” said the chairman’s aide Hwang Young-key. “It was quite a well-
aged message. He’d been thinking about it for years and years.”
But not everyone was convinced by the previously awkward heir, now
suddenly bursting with charisma. Some thought they were being
collectively reprimanded, when personally they had done nothing wrong.
One executive, Oh Jung-hwan, said that Lee Kun-hee’s rebuke of his
executives included “expletives and vulgar words.”
On the third day, the chairman asked his executives over a meal what
they thought of the previous three days.
“I’m sorry, sir, but quantity also matters,” said one man at the table. “I
think quality and quantity are just like two sides of the same coin.”
Chairman Lee, holding a spoon, threw it on the table and stormed out of
the room.
Clearly the speeches in Frankfurt alone were not enough to turn the
company around and transform the culture. Over the next three months the
chairman went on a whirlwind tour to London, Osaka, and Tokyo, giving
forty-eight talks, amounting to 350 hours of lectures. Some of these
lectures went on for as long as 16 hours.
“After two weeks, we had to start washing our underwear ourselves and
hang them on the hotel veranda, to the protests of the hotel management,”
said Hyung Myung Kwan, head of the chairman’s secretariat, who
accompanied the chairman on the tour.
“I don’t know how he did it,” his nephew Henry admitted.
In the end, his speeches came to 8,500 pages of transcripts. The
company began calling Lee’s speeches the “New Management Initiative.”