By the late 1980s, Samsung had been a company for over fifty years. And things were getting stale. The story goes that after he took over as chairman in 1987, Lee Kun-hee, the third son of the company’s founder, gathered together his employees told them “Let’s change everything except our wives and kids”, then led the company in a mass bonfire of 150,000 mobile phone handsets.
As a statement of intent, it’s a pretty good metaphor for Lee’s desire to cast out the old way of doing things and start afresh. As a story, well, it might have picked up some embellishment along the way.
But then, we are talking about the man dubbed “the hermit king” of South Korea’s chaebols. A man twice convicted of crimes, including bribing a sitting president. A man who later received a presidential pardon (from another president) and went on to lead his country’s successful Olympic bid.
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