Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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)
This is is rhetoric,not reality.
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.
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.
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 ()