In February 1993, five years after replacing his father in South Korea’s Samsung Group, Lee Kun-hee, 51, was frustrated that he was not making his mark.
He summoned a group of Samsung Electronics executives to a Best Buy store in Los Angeles to check out the reality of the Samsung brand. Covered in dust, a Samsung TV sat on a corner shelf priced nearly $ 100 cheaper than a rival Sony Corp model.
After a tense nine-hour follow-up meeting, Lee initiated a strategic shift at Samsung, to gain market share through quality, not quantity.
Lee, who died at age 78 on Sunday after being hospitalized for a heart attack in 2014, was fueled by a constant sense of crisis, which he instilled in his leadership teams to drive change and fight complacency. In the mid-1990s, Lee personally withdrew about $ 50 million worth of shoddy cell phones and fax machines and set them on fire.
This focus on the crisis, and his often abrasive manner, helped Lee turn his father Lee Byung-chull’s noodle trading business into a sprawling business empire with assets worth 424 trillion won ($ 375,000). million) in May 2020 in dozens of affiliates ranging from electronics and insurance to construction and shipbuilding.
Samsung Electronics went from being a second-tier television maker to the world’s largest technology company by revenue, eliminating Japanese brands Sony, Sharp Corp, and Panasonic Corp in chips, televisions, and displays; end the supremacy of Nokia Oyj phones; and beating Apple Inc on smartphones.
In a 1997 essay, Lee recalled his frustration with directing inertia. “The external business environment was not good … but there was no sense of anxiety within the organization, and everyone seemed to be swallowed up by the presumption … I needed to tense them a bit and repeatedly remind managers that they need to feel. crisis “.
In 2013, Forbes named Lee the second most powerful South Korean, behind only United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Four months after the Los Angeles meeting, Lee called his lieutenants into a Frankfurt hotel conference room, where he presented his “New Management” plan, exhorting executives to “change everything except his wife and children.” .
Executive meetings were brutal, often lasting up to 10 hours, and participants were even afraid to drink water as they did not want to have to interrupt Lee’s flow by visiting the bathroom.
Lee’s business acumen made him the subject of endless fascination and speculation in Korea, but he and the empire he built have also been vilified by critics and activist shareholders for wielding such economic clout, opaque and hierarchical government, and dubious transfers of money. family wealth.
In 2008, Lee was accused of managing a political fund and helping his children buy shares in the Samsung company cheaply. Prosecutors were unable to prove any of the charges, but Lee was convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement. He apologized and resigned, only to return two years after a presidential pardon.
Since then, he had kept a lower profile and delegated an army of managers, while promoting his son, Jay Y. Lee, to vice president, a position in preparation for the eventual transfer of power.
As his health deteriorated, Lee needed help walking and was susceptible to respiratory illnesses after lung cancer treatment, a less frequent presence at Samsung headquarters, spending long winter vacations in Japan or Hawaii.
But his control over the group remained intact. Whenever he traveled abroad, at least four of Samsung’s top executives, along with company personnel and security, were at the airport to fire him.
At Samsung’s HRD center, the tens of thousands of employees attending training sessions quietly watch over a mock-up of the drab Frankfurt hotel conference room, complete with furniture specially imported from Germany. Since most of Samsung’s staff are in their 20s and 30s and did not experience the heyday of Lee’s management first-hand, this tribute serves to remind them of the need to “think in crisis,” said several people who have been trained in the center.
EXPOSURE TO JAPAN
Lee was born in 1942 in the southern village of Uiryeong, the third son of the founder of Samsung. He was sent to Japan at the age of 11, right after the Korean War ended. Their father wanted his children to learn how Japan was rebuilding itself from the ashes of World War II.
He has admitted to being a loner and found it difficult to make friends when he returned to a country full of anti-Japanese sentiments. He returned to Japan to study economics at Waseda University and then business administration at George Washington University in the United States.
His early exposure to advanced technology from Japan led him to establish the foundation of Samsung Electronics by forming alliances with companies such as Sanyo and adopting chip and television manufacturing technologies.
Lee began his career at Samsung in broadcasting, ascending to group president in 1987, breaking with the traditional Confucian practice of the eldest son taking the reins. His older brother, Lee Maeng-hee, was initially chosen to run Samsung in 1967 when his father retired, but his aggressive management style caused friction with the founder’s confidants, according to several books on Samsung.
The second son, Lee Chang-hee, broke family ties by telling the presidential office that his father had a $ 1 million bribe fund overseas.
Lee senior exiled Chang-hee to the United States and returned as president. In 1976, diagnosed with cancer, he passed the business to Kun-hee. Chang-hee died in 1991.
Kun-hee’s hunched posture due to a traffic accident, soft voice, round eyes, and often puzzled expression were atypical for such a powerful character. Married to Hong Ra-hee, who runs a Samsung-affiliated art gallery called Leeum, a combination of Lee and museum, Lee had a son and three daughters.
His youngest daughter died in New York in 2005, which Samsung said in a car accident, but media reports said it was suicide.
Lee had been a member of the International Olympic Committee between 1996 and 2017.
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