I worked for a chaebol in the U.S. (not Hyundai). I can attest to the two-week indoctrination session in the Korean countryside, never leaving before your boss, never ever contradicting a Korean manager, organizational structure modeled after the Korean military, the whole nine yards. It's brutal. I'm glad Hyundai are living up to their name (modern) and beginning to shed the old way of doing business.
Also, and completely tangential to the point, I want to mention that Korean mobile-phone / meeting etiquette is very interesting. You don't leave the room to take a call. Instead, you turn toward the wall, lean over, say "yo bo sae o", and then hold a conversation that is audible to the rest of the room only as a series of quiet murmurs. I think Korean phonemes are somehow optimal for very quiet conversations like this. Maybe because there aren't very many, and they're pretty distinct from each other. I have no science to back that up.
The same things go on in America, just under slightly different guises, I would say. This is a not-uncommon pattern:
0) There is a problem that needs to be fixed.
1) Boss recommends A
2) Engineer knows A won't work, but they try it anyway
3) A doesn't work, so they stay up late implementing B. (Of course, they wouldn't have had to stay up late had they just been allowed to implement B first...)
4) B works
5) Boss takes the credit
6) After years of making the boss look good, engineer gets promoted
In most cultures co-pilots are encouraged to speak out when the pilot has or is about to make a mistake. There were several Korean Air crashes where the co-pilots knew the pilot was wrong and did nothing, in some cases costing them their lives. After recognizing this there was a strong push to change the culture at Korean Air, but I don't know that this was a lesson brought over to other industries.
Here's another layer of complication.
Gladwell twists the truth a bit to make a good story, however AskAKorean also twists the truth a bit to make a good refutation. Based on the transcript that AskAKorea posted, it's very clear that the first officer is acting deferentially to the pilot. Specifically, the first officer uses polite speech with the pilot, and the pilot uses familiar speech with the first officer. This indicates quite a big social status gap. As an example, in my company (I am working in Korea), neither my manager nor my manager's manager uses familiar speech with me, I'd have to go up 3 levels for that to start happening. What Gladwell mentioned in his book about hierarchy does not feel exaggerated, and there's likely a large grain of truth to Gladwell's representation of what happened. Also, if you look through AskAKorean's previous blogs, you can notice a fairly nationalistic streak in his posts, which may explain his strong opinions regarding Gladwell's assertions.
This phenomenon appears in more than one culture, and I think in just about every culture it is damaging to conducting effective business, but not _extremely_.
Only companies big enough to endure this kind of damage (or smart enough to make sure it doesn't happen) are the ones that make it. If you're running a startup with 3-5 people, and someone is wrong about something, chances are the stakes are much much larger than a 100 person company. As such, you can't afford to have this kind of culture at startup scale, but you can, at large scale, because everyone gets more chances to be wrong (and have the company stay afloat). Then you start thinking about 1,000+, 10,000+, 100,000+ people companies and you can imagine how many small inefficiencies/mistakes like this companies can withstand.
Depending on where you work in the US, there are still managers/bosses that don't like to be contradicted, because of some perception of loss of authority/power/credibility/etc (and most likely some personal insecurity).
Yes. A lot more than in your average tech company. You still don't see that many female executives, but at the bottom, the influx of fresh grad hires is pretty much 50/50.
No, South Korea is arguably the least equal, developed nation.
"Korean women with high levels of education actually have a more difficult time being accommodated in the workforce. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2012, the current ratio of women to men in upper management positions and public office is a meager 1 to 9. At 104th, Korea ranks below some of the world’s least developed countries, such as Burkina Faso, Malawi and Syria."
"Women in Korea make on average 39 percent less than men. This difference in wages ranks Korea bottom amongst peer nations in regards to pay equality."
Yes, and speaking from experience they were the better managers to work with. There are also significant numbers of women employed in technical roles outside of the chaebols, I found the ratio of female-to-male programmers and engineers was much higher than in the US or Australia.
well in the entry level positions but most of those women marry other chaeabol company men - often their superiors - and then some stop working once they marry
> MEETINGS to last no more than 30 minutes; junior staff allowed to speak freely with superiors; a cut in bonuses for bosses whose teams do not take enough holidays. Since 2012 “Pride”, a handbook, has set a new tone for the internal culture of Hyundai Capital. Departments whose staff work latest into the evening are listed on the firm’s intranet: not to hold them up as models of hard work, but to tell them off for not working efficiently enough.
Noticed something missing? Like, employees taking initiatives or changing something. Instead, "cultural change" is mandated from the top. "You have to be less hierarchical, and here's an employment handbook telling you how to!"
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
If you took the "initiative" of working less without your boss's consent you'd be fired.
Coming from the top is the only way to legitimize, and thus bootstrap change.
Having worked at LG for 3 yrs, I'm skeptical this change will come easy. But 'cultural change' is almost always mandated from the top even at US tech startups. From Amazon to Zappos, culture is set by CEO.
I started a Ph.D. in electronic engineering at a prestigious Korean university.
When the professor refused to pay my scholarship, I took it up with the international office.
The international office had a word with the professor.
The professor's "solution" was to fire me, for "disrespecting his authority".
I lost my professor, so I lost my lab. So I lost my university. So I lost my student visa. Suddenly, I had to leave the country.
Korea is my ex-country. We had so much in common, but it's over. The whole culture is judging based on appearance. Cheat in tests, do plastic surgery, copy shamelessly - just get the results, and nobody cares how you got there. Students would typically stay in the lab until 3 am and return at 6 am, if they ever left. Fold-out camping beds were very common. One professor even put a GPS tracker on an international student in his lab "for research purposes". Gender equality is abysmal. Forced after-hours drinking was one part where I actively refused, and I probably only avoided judgment for that because I'm a foreigner.
Contrast that to Taiwan. Hours here (9 am to 7 pm) are longer than Europe (9 am to 5 pm) and holidays are short (8 days per year), but the culture is infinitely better. All opinions may be aired. Elders are respected, but are not considered infallible. Gender equality is excellent in both the corporate world and the rest of society. Stereotypes do exist, but abusive racism is rare. Foreigners are welcomed: I will never be a true local, but it's not a bad thing to be an outsider. The lack of a deep-seated culture makes society more welcoming, as is common in young countries e.g. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, even the US. So in short, while Taiwan and Korea seem to get the same results, in Taiwan, the end does not justify the means, and people here generally do things the right way.
Korea is a great place; your complaints are valid. What I learned from living there is that there can be unexpected benefits to repeated rehearsal (also sometimes referred to as "rote memorization") which I find to be undervalued in the US education system. This of course can be taken too far.
Why haven't more liberal/agile (no, not Agile) companies beaten these companies? That their policies are harmful seems to be considered a fact, so a company without those policies could be much more productive.
Because the society considers such culture good (working at an old-style company is more approved of); established companies have government, business, and family ties that give them enough advantage to get away with some inefficiency; and people who don't believe in these values (i.e. potential founders of companies that would disrupt these values) are by definition so far outside of the mainstream that they may have trouble accessing social resources like capital and advice.
There are endless reasons why societies and economies converge on non-optimal ways of doing things. The market doesn't fix everything.
"There is a lot of ruin in a nation." — Adam Smith
This seems to be true of all sorts of large, complicated systems. Smith naturally focused on countries, but large organizations like companies and nonprofits can waste resources like this, too. The human body exhibits this behavior, too — imagine how many things that could go wrong with yours that would nevertheless still leave you able to go to work.
Well, there's more to a successful company than this. Simply being an established company can have benefits that outweigh this, perhaps very strongly so in Korean culture.
Part of it is capital. The chaebol completely dominate the Korean economy and any serious competitors are taken out with mergers and acquisitions. The other part is that the model works and the companies are profitable. Sure, they could be more profitable with less wasted time and more productive employees but they already have an overwhelming majority in the Korean economy and they are globally competitive. It irks me to see more productive methods of work that are not adopted but yo can see that in every country.
Hm, seems quite oppressive. Westernization of the Korean work ethic is emotionally appealing, but who's to say what works best for them... I imagine that the mores regarding vacation time and amount of time worked will be very slow to die, and people who violate these norms (justly) will be punished socially.
Anecdotally (~4 years), the vast majority of Koreans I've met detest the work culture here. Whether it works best or not will not be the deciding factor, I'd think.
Many of the strict changes will likely be from the start-up world that make their way up as they are doing now. However, you're probably right particularly regarding vacation time and time worked. I've worked and have friends working at start-ups that, while are relaxed about other parts of company culture, still remain fairly antiquated when it comes to those topics.
I really hope this catches on, because there are places with more modern approaches on paper, but there's no way for the employee to make use of it without consequences.
Are there any stats or numbers on the number of companies converting to these kinds of policies? It would be interesting to see just how large or small this trend is.
