points leaped out at me that seemed to define the chairman’s philosophy:
1. Healthy paranoia and a disdain for complacency, to survive in a
cold, cruel, Darwinian technology industry.
2. A sense of perpetual crisis and a need to find opportunities in
crisis.
3. The importance of quality control and the reduction of waste.
4. Human resources, talent, and training as the pillars of a strong
workforce.
5. The urgency of building a flexible, long-term, globally minded
corporate culture, rather than an inward, short-term, bureaucratic
one.A comic strip called Let’s Change Ourselves First: A Comic Book About
Samsung’s New Management Story was published in 1994 by the Samsung
Economics Research Institute (or SERI). The cartoons were professionally
drawn by famous South Korean cartoonist Lee Won-bok. In it, Chairman
Lee chided Samsung’s executives for being arrogant and petty and lacking
manners. One cartoon showed a Samsung Man getting drunk, sticking his
face in a noodle bowl, and declaring, “This is my country,” in front of a
Western businessman who, sipping wine, calls him “uncivilized.”
“How miserable it is to become a country which is economically
subordinate to other countries,” the book went on. The statement was
accompanied by an illustration of American, Japanese, Russian, and
Chinese villains ganging up on a placid, scholarly Korean aristocrat.
“If you know your enemy, you yourself can win every battle,” the comic
book continued, calling on Samsung employees to plan their strategy
properly and work together for the coming fight. Their success, the
chairman declared, required the trinity of government, people, and
corporation, unified under a grand cause—with business at the vanguard.
“To make myself, my country, the Korean people, my children, and my
descendants successful,” the comic book claimed, “we should make a new
leap forward.”
In 1993 Samsung employees watched thirty-minute sermons by the
chairman every morning for several months on the in-house broadcasting
service, where Lee ordered his employees to examine their morality and
rediscover their pasts.