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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.'"
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.
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.