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Samsung Plans To Give Up Authoritarian Ways, Act Like a Startup
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung on Thursday announced that it plans to reform its internal culture to act like a startup. Se Young Lee reports for Reuters, "Samsung's executives will sign a pledge to move away from a top-down culture and towards a working environment that fosters open dialogue. The flagship firm of South Korea's dominant conglomerate will also reduce the number of levels in its staff hierarchy and hold more frequent online discussions between business division heads and employees. [...] The pronouncement is the latest among sweeping changes attempted at a time of crisis by the conglomerate and carries echoes of a 1993 exhortation by Samsung Group patriarch Lee Kun-hee to executives to 'change everything but your wife and children.'"
Foosball tables now bitches!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Yeah, sure, they're going to get startup culture. But only after they splinter into the two hundred or so companies that operate in the markets they do.
Sell their stock now.
I've been in several companies that tried this to be "fast and maneuverable" but the reality is that corporation shattered into dozens of fiefdoms some with their own "warlords" who didn't want to work towards a common goal but were more interested in maintaining their own power. Good teams stayed good but bad teams got worse.
An open culture is great but the hierarchy is there for a very hard and concrete reason - For the CEO to manage control of the company's production units.
TL;DR - the CEO just abdicated his role for the sake of a political sound-bite (probably because he's out of ideas)
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge. Ask any worker under conditions of strict anonymity, and I'm sure they'll cite the lack of executive-level pledges as their main day-to-day impediment.
They said a lot of words.
Samsung on Thursday announced that it plans to reform its internal culture to act like a startup.
Big companies cannot act like a startup. The very structures that allow them to be big prevent it from happening. They protect their current businesses and they ignore market opportunities that are too small to move their balance sheet. Big companies pay mouth service to trying to "act like a startup" but the plain fact is that doing so is impossible and unnecessary. Being big has lots of advantages. GE has been huge for over a century but they've updated their business as times have changed and have not acted like a startup since they were one.
The company is basically Korea. Try spitting up so your shitty tvs don't get a bad reputation from your shitty phones and your shitty washing machines don't get a bad reputation from your shitty kimchi.
Sure, and Google won't be evil. This is just a PR band aid to help distract from their Orwellian telescreens or to smooth over some internal revolt among their employees. Act first, Samsung, then you can brag about how high your horse is.
...meant to say they had ordered a bunch of GALANT desks from ikea and now have an employee rule in the handbook forcing them to live in his or her car (and blog about it) one day a month minimum.
OMG facts!
Hopefully if they draw from that quote themselves they substitute 'wife' with 'spouse', lest they draw the ire a la Microsoft last week.
I once worked for a company where all the executives took a week long "retreat" to work on improving the business.
After a week of working together, they added one line to the "value statement".
Not the "mission statement".
Not the "vision statement".
They extended the "value statement" to include a line about valuing the employees.
And a few years later that company went under.
Maybe in Korea at the mothership. No sign of this here in NA.
This is is rhetoric,not reality.
Will they change their products in any way? I'm leaving my Samsung Galaxy for another droid. They pack so much bloatware on their phones even the reviews have taken note, and the otherwise excellent S7 looks like a turd.
The pronouncement is the latest among sweeping changes attempted at a time of crisis by the conglomerate and carries echoes of a 1993 exhortation by Samsung Group patriarch Lee Kun-hee to executives to 'change everything but your wife and children.
As if no executives are ever married to any men whatsoever? What a clodly thing to say.
But on the other hand.. that lowly line will likely make a good story for tomorrow's Slashdot. It's a thorny issue indeed: why would you NOT want to change your children? Isn't the whole point of raising a kid to have it change into something semi-acceptable if not passable?
They extended the "value statement" to include a line about valuing the employees. And a few years later that company went under.
That shows you what happens when you have a company that values its employees.
But I don't know about working for Samsung. "Change everything but your wife and children." Those are two things I might like to change, but I really don't want to change the mistress I've grown fond of.
And can I keep my doctor if I like my doctor? Oh, wait ...
Damn slashdot, logging me out every time I try to preview or submit. Fix this shit.
Hah... Doomed to fail, or make only very little difference, unless the company also leads social change as a national brand.
Korean work culture is all kinds of fucked up, and everyone is unwillingly complicit. Everyone does it, for some unknown reason, so you feel you have to do it too.
Examples:
-- Expected late working hours until the boss leaves, sometimes >10pm, because showing your face at work is more valued than the work itself getting done. And the boss probably feels pressure to stay late, to not appear lazy. Very little actual work gets done in those late hours.
-- Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours, and not only that but also shady, overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars. If you don't partake you're viewed as not part of the team.
-- If you get home early for some reason (say 10pm), your wife asks you if something is wrong at work?
-- Even kids are in on the ingrained culture - they go to cram schools into the late hours past midnight, to prep for college entrance exams. Good training for later life.
Something is deeply wrong with this culture, which one big company might be able change if it threw itself headlong at the problem and declared certain practices forbidden - to help change the "understood practices". But I doubt that is the extent they're willing to go.
The sad thing is that if you take a Korean and transplant him/her to a different culture, they would do just fine living a normal, not fucked-up lifestyle as in their home country.
An aircraft carrier can go fast enough so that you could water-ski behind it. It can launch more planes than some country's entire air forces. It almost certainly has some gun emplacements and many sailors with small arms. If pirates in speedboats attack it, they are toast... but not because the carrier out-maneuvers them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Everyone work 60-80 hour weeks (as on-call for those "budding business emergencies") and take a 30% pay cut!
"Other moves in recent years to ease a rigid corporate culture include flexible working hours, a loosening of dress code requirements for weekend work and less pressure on employees to attend after-work drinking sessions that have long been a staple of Korean corporate life."
Loosening of dress code for weekend work? Somewhat less pressure for mandatory binge drinking? Wow, thanks!!! [bows vigorously]
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Like by locking the bootloader on the S7 and S7 Edge? Is that our example of less authoritarian ways?
The fact that they think they can change the culture to not be so hierarchical by sending down orders to be less hierarchical is kind of amusing.
When South Korea hired themselves a Dutch coach for their 2002 World Cup national team, he quickly discovered that there was an ingrained culture of deference that was really difficult to combat. I believe he eventually had to kick most of the veterans off the team to get his whole team on an equal social footing.
In the case of a large company, I don't think that's really an option. I'm not sure how they could combat that. Heck, I'm not even convinced a native Korean upper-level manager could even wrap their mind around the problem.
Work the insane hours like a startup, get paid like startup (which means the paycheck might not be forthcoming, sometimes for months) possibly big layoff like startup, minus the big "pay day" since it won't go public (again) or get acquired. Sounded mostly like what they've been doing for some time.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
None of these "lean and nimble" things end up working out in the idealized, hoped-for way. I've been at a few mega-large corporations and even some medium sized ones that had developed a massive bureaucracy and an authoritarian culture. You don't change that overnight. I know a lot of long-tenure IBMers who have 2 full time jobs -- their real job and the internal political navigation job. Microsoft is like this now. GM is like this. Even if you went through with a chainsaw and cut all the management layers off the org chart, the business just wouldn't function without radical mind-shifts on everyone's part.
This is some McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group pre-packaged consulting engagement that got sold to the board. I'll bet they came in with the same PowerPoints they used on the last one, with the logo changed. This usually involves one or more of the following:
- Encouraging "collaborative workspaces" by adopting open-plan offices and removing personal space, replacing it with white, pink and green Ikea office furniture
- Rearranging management deck chairs, maybe by getting rid of 1 or 2 layers
- Forcing managers to establish things like open door policies
- Hundreds of hours of trainings and meetings on the new collaborative, startup-inspired Samsung
Nothing else will change, I guarantee it. Korean work culture is like Japanese work culture -- authoritarian is putting it mildly when discussing management style. The idea is nice, but you can't run a huge corporation whose employees depend on its continued existence as a startup. There's just too much chance some hotshot MBA in some division will end up tanking the whole thing. I've been at companies where it has somewhat worked out, but only after the company realizes they're still huge and bureaucratic, and focuses on getting individual teams to work better together.
I hear they are asking KPCB to fund them... begging for money? Now THAT'S a startup!
In the British Commonwealth, the move towards democracy came as the Monarchy gradually gave up power. Just because it happened differently in one very notable case, doesn't mean it can never happen otherwise.
Expected late working hours... Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours... overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars....Even kids are in on the ingrained culture - they go to cram schools into the late hours past midnight,
So what you are saying here is that Samsung is already a tech startup.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tou will here the words "5000 years of civilization" there frequently. What they neglect to mention is that its authoritarian top down culture inherited from China. Companies began in Europe and democracy and republicanism too. These concepts, together with liberalism, which are at the heart or modern startup culture are completely alien to Koreans and Asia in general. Samsung is actually what we call a fascist company. It was formed by the state in the dictaorship of president Park ()
So, latest Android updates even on old Samsung Note 2 ?
If true that is about the most superficial way possible to "act like a startup". Stuff like a ping pong table are just trappings. You have to really change the company culture (very hard to do) to have it actually mean anything.
I had friends that started working in Samsung. They aren't friends anymore. The company grinds down employees till they break and you either take it or bail. Maybe the compensation is amazing, who knows.
Bye!
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge.
I hope everyone realise that pledge isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I wish them the best of luck, and no doubt they are right about the problems of their management culture.
But this sort of thing is invariable ugly. Like modifying an aircraft in mid-flight. When making the changes you usually get the worst of both worlds, for quite awhile. This can drive an organization to complete failure. Small organizations have better luck at this.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I'll admit to being pretty excited if Samsung can actually make this work. Samsung's excellence in product manufacturing has long been hampered by poor product vision, scattershot branding and marketing strategies, and a general lack of being on the same wavelength when it comes to anticipating what features consumers will actually want and use.
If acting like a startup can help them shed these shortcomings, we can expect to see some exciting products coming out of Samsung in the next six to twelve years. That should be just in time for when Apple comes down off the revenue bubble presently sustained by its perpetual, but largely uninteresting, product updates.
Sociopaths are running nearly everything. A Samsung CEO isn't content making tens of millions of dollars a year; he needs to make billions overnight, like the Zuckerbergs and Brins. So who cares that 90% of startups fold, and that 99.999% will never see the fluky success of the big IPOs. Who cares that there's no logic or skill behind those flukes; no revolutionary ideas, just being the lucky SOB with the right incremental idea at the right time with the right suckers. Who cares that startups are lean because they have to be; they can't afford highly specialized market analysis teams, a trained sales force, diverse domain experts, scientists and engineers with proven track records--everything that a larger company can do to actually understand the marketplace and build products that actually solve customers' needs. Let's waste all those specialized resource, flatten all the hierarchies, throw all the ingredients into a big blender and produce homogenized slop. No evil waterfall planning here!
So, if they're going to behave more like a startup, does that mean that they're no longer going to make it difficult to customize their Android phones? Last time I checked, they were still locked down such that you cannot write to the boot loader and that means no rolling your own Android or using Cyanogenmod.
Today is only March 24th.
Does this mean they will finally end the dual management structure at the US sites? One of the impediments at Samsung Austin Semiconductor site has been the dual Korean and American management structure where the American managers are expected to take care of daily operations while each Korean "shadow"/counterpart/whatever manager makes the final decision and can overrule any American. The structure made some sense when the site opened in 1996 but to continue it today does not make any sense. Their idea will probably be to layoff of American managers not of Korean descent.
And men lost all their privledges and women had the marriage age increased and increased.
I once was a participant in such a "retreat". And believe me, even if you are a senior manager, you've got no way of telling your CEO that all this talk about "values" and "statements" is utter bullshit unless you actually start changing how you act, not just how you talk. But changing how you act might involve doing things with no immediate ROI seen by the C-level guys, so it does not happen. This "management retreat" stuff is just a complete waste of time.
As someone with extensive experience in (*South* !) Korea, I'll note that this whole concept sounds as Korean as eating Corn Flakes mixed with kimchi.
Good luck with that.
So close and yet so far! If they had stayed away another year or two, the company might have made a dramatic recovery.
Bwahhhahahahahahahahahahahaahahahhhaahahahahha!
http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-02-09
http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-01-03
Samsung didn't get the memo that 90% of Startups fail, typically min more than 4 yrs.
These types of moves are drastic and indicates a company has too much free money.
Hmmm. I wonder if this means the Galaxy S8 will get back a removable battery, or IOW, a GOOD battery design. And implement a no-sense-zone at the edges so it doesn't keep doing random shit the way my s7 does unless I hold it open palm, no fingers on the sides. Oh, and put my groups back in the damned phone. Maybe actually properly transfer my shite from my current phone to my next phone (my note 3 -to- S7 "transfer" moved about half my apps, and no app data at all. THAT was unpleasant.)
Nah. Probably means they'll just take the removable memory card out of the next model. "Whoops." :/
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And now cats and dogs are living together.
that sets them apart, and above.
I have a Samsung Monitor and when you turn it on the power light goes off. Every other display the power light comes on, my Panasonic Plasma it's a red light set dead center at the bottom of the screen.
When will they stop photocopying Apple? http://fortune.com/2011/05/09/inside-apple/
then maybe some of the equally large and fossilized american corporations will try it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
A cultural change will never happen without the likes of a Chairman Lee Kun-hee to lead, and lead, and slash, and lead, and slash, and lead. He truly did lead Samsung from the stone age to modernity by relentlessly demanding the desired behaviour (Quality, Not Quantity) from his underlings and by punishing back-sliders. His shoes are now empty.
Recently I was employed by one of their companies, Samsung Engineering Co., Ltd, and the culture of rewarding ineptitude and of accepting rigid self-serving idiots as leaders was staggering.
Samsung Group will survive because of its size and because the Korean government won't let it perish. But its 15 minutes of fame are over, as are the sunny days of fame and fortune in all of Korea.
My prediction is that all earlier profits will be lost and the company will be a stagnant third-tier player within 18 months.