Lee kun hee passing of a corporate titan

Lee kun hee passing of a corporate titan

With the passing of Lee Kun-hee, a vital chapter of the transformation of the Samsung Group into one of the world’s powerhouses of technology and innovation comes to an end.

The chapter did not begin in 1987 when he succeeded his father as chairman, but in 1993, when he convened a meeting of his senior-most executives in Frankfurt to announce a quality revolution at the company — no more shoddy stuff that sold at a grudging pace and required constant servicing afterwards.

In 1995, he made his staff watch a bonfire of 150,000 pieces of the company’s electronic equipment, mostly mobile phones, that did not meet his expectation of quality.

Thanks to his leadership, Samsung today is one of the world’s largest corporate spenders on R&D. Days before he died, Samsung and Stanford University announced the development of an OLED display that carries more than 10,000 pixels per square inch, more than 20 times the pixel density available in a flagship phone screen today.

This paves the way for better virtual and augmented reality kit. The short point is that in two generations of visionary leadership, a company that sold dry fish and other grocery in a South Korean town became the world’s largest producer of mobile phones and memory chips, and is a driving force of the South Korean economy, the world’s 12th largest, although its population is smaller than Tamil Nadu’s.

Ambition, commitment and hard work are not anyone’s monopoly. The Samsung model is up for grabs — for Indian companies, as well.

South Korea’s policy of forcing its companies to compete with the best in the world helped, apart from management will to excel. India chooses to shelter its companies from foreign competition.

This, too, much change, for a Samsung to emerge here.