The chairman instituted a 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. workday to improve
his employees’ quality of life—rather than having them work late nights
every day. Of course, that meant the actual working hours were “more like
7:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M.,” as Kim Nam-yoon, an engineer, told me.
In 1995 the chairman’s New Year’s gift to family and friends was
Samsung’s new black mobile phones. But he was embarrassed to discover
that some were returned because they were faulty. Nearly one in eight of
Samsung’s mobile phones, in fact, that year were defective. Clearly the
chairman’s grand proclamations weren’t getting through.
In March of that year, he ordered his employees to prepare a giant
bonfire, a sort of purification ritual, near the mobile handset factory in
Gumi, an industrial city in the south-central part of the country.
The chairman summoned factory workers and engineers to a courtyard,
assembling them in phalanxes against the barren, wheat-colored mountains.
They were made to don headbands that read QUALITY FIRST. A banner
over the courtyard read QUALITY IS MY PRIDE. A virtual mountain of
cellphones, fax machines, and whatever else was deemed junk—over
140,000 devices worth $50 million—stood before them.
A few employees at the front approached a microphone, raised their
right hand, and read pledges that they would treat quality control with the
utmost seriousness. The chairman and his board of directors listened from a
row of seats nearby.
At a prearranged signal, nine employees rummaged through the mounds
of metal and plastic, hammering each phone or device into pieces and
throwing the shattered remains into a pile.
Then they “covered the pile with a net and poured petrol on them,”
Gordon Kim, human resources director, told me, and set them on fire.
After they had melted and burned, a bulldozer razed the remains.
“If you continue to make poor-quality products like these,” the
chairman announced to the workers before him, “I’ll come back and do the
same thing.”
Some of the people who had designed and built the phones cried. It was
“as if their babies had died,” Kim Seon-jeong, a former financial executive,
told me. Moreover, to be humiliated like that before the Samsung
“emperor” was the ultimate loss of face.