Samsung Plans To Give Up Authoritarian Ways, Act Like a Startup 98
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.'"
Re: (Score:1)
Don't forget throwing away millions on faggoty pink and green office furniture.
It never works (Score:5, Interesting)
This is is rhetoric,not reality.
Especially there (Score:2, Interesting)
Tou will here the words "5000 years of civilization" there frequently. What they neglect to mention is that its authoritarian top down culture inherited from China. Companies began in Europe and democracy and republicanism too. These concepts, together with liberalism, which are at the heart or modern startup culture are completely alien to Koreans and Asia in general. Samsung is actually what we call a fascist company. It was formed by the state in the dictaorship of president Park ()
Hmmm. (Score:2)
Hmmm. I wonder if this means the Galaxy S8 will get back a removable battery, or IOW, a GOOD battery design. And implement a no-sense-zone at the edges so it doesn't keep doing random shit the way my s7 does unless I hold it open palm, no fingers on the sides. Oh, and put my groups back in the damned phone. Maybe actually properly transfer my shite from my current phone to my next phone (my note 3 -to- S7 "transfer" moved about half my apps, and no app data at all. THAT was unpleasant.)
Nah.
Re: (Score:1)
oh, they've gone startup alright. (Score:2)
Work the insane hours like a startup, get paid like startup (which means the paycheck might not be forthcoming, sometimes for months) possibly big layoff like startup, minus the big "pay day" since it won't go public (again) or get acquired. Sounded mostly like what they've been doing for some time.
Re: (Score:2)
you forgot make vauge promises, realign to be buzzword compliant a few times, and burn through investor money before management bails.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, this is all buzzwords. A huge multinational corporation isn't a startup by definition. They may be able to *fund* startups, but they are nothing like a startup, and in many ways, I don't know why they'd want to be one. Samsung is a large, possibly bloated, but stable going concern. Why do they want to turn into a edgy, over-valued, under-revenued, wanna-be?
Yeah, startups are interesting places to work, but I don't see why a corporation would want to turn into one. Nine out of ten startups fail. A
There goes the company - (Score:2, Interesting)
Sell their stock now.
I've been in several companies that tried this to be "fast and maneuverable" but the reality is that corporation shattered into dozens of fiefdoms some with their own "warlords" who didn't want to work towards a common goal but were more interested in maintaining their own power. Good teams stayed good but bad teams got worse.
An open culture is great but the hierarchy is there for a very hard and concrete reason - For the CEO to manage control of the company's production units.
TL;DR -
Re: (Score:2)
So pretty much like every other multinational megacorp with hundreds of divisions each jostling for a share of the budget.
Did he abdicate? Or did he just throw a half-dozen layers of middle management out of the plane?
Re: (Score:2)
Did he abdicate? Or did he just throw a half-dozen layers of middle management out of the plane?
why not both?
Re: (Score:2)
Did he abdicate? Or did he just throw a half-dozen layers of middle management out of the plane?
No, he does the Hitler thing and encourages his underlings to jostle for his table scraps, so that they'll all be too busy to usurping him.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh, the art of war.
The first step away from a "top-down culture"... (Score:5, Funny)
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge. Ask any worker under conditions of strict anonymity, and I'm sure they'll cite the lack of executive-level pledges as their main day-to-day impediment.
Re: (Score:2)
I once worked for a company where all the executives took a week long "retreat" to work on improving the business.
After a week of working together, they added one line to the "value statement".
Not the "mission statement".
Not the "vision statement".
They extended the "value statement" to include a line about valuing the employees.
And a few years later that company went under.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
So close and yet so far! If they had stayed away another year or two, the company might have made a dramatic recovery.
Re: (Score:2)
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge.
I hope everyone realise that pledge isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Big companies cannot act like startups (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re: (Score:1)
Nonsense. Startups are defined by low compensation, promises of future prosperity, and vaporware. Samsung can adopt all of those quite easily without losing a single bureaucrat.
Superficial (Score:2)
If true that is about the most superficial way possible to "act like a startup". Stuff like a ping pong table are just trappings. You have to really change the company culture (very hard to do) to have it actually mean anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for paraphrasing, "The Innovator's Dilemma".
Re: (Score:1)
Their HDs are shit too. I had a WD fail (I had two of the ones with the head parking problem which I found out about later than I should) and replaced it with a Samsung.
The Samsung has failed, but the remaining WD is still fine.
Re: (Score:2)
Samsung HD's have been rebranded Seagates for quite a few years. The only thing in common is the name.
I've had mixed success with Samsung drives in the past; they were excellent in the ~300GB/platter size (I had 1TB models), but it seems like the ~160GB/platter drives had a high failure rate.
That said, yes Seagate has had absolutely terrible failure rates of late. I think they're at about 5x the failure rate of HGST and Toshiba while also providing worse performance.
Well, Samsung had crap for drive firmware. The only brand of drives we had that we didn't have to pound on for it to corrupt user data. They're followed by WD and Seagate (in that order.) But with the latter, it's mostly mechanical problem, not firmware problem.
Re: (Score:2)
It's 100% of the ones I've owned, and 100% of the ones I'm ever going to.
P.S. I probably know more about stats than you do, you pretentious little whiner.
As the 'dot turns (Score:2)
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.
As if no executives are ever married to any men whatsoever? What a clodly thing to say.
But on the other hand.. that lowly line will likely make a good story for tomorrow's Slashdot. It's a thorny issue indeed: why would you NOT want to change your children? Isn't the whole point of raising a kid to have it change into something semi-acceptable if not passable?
Re: As the 'dot turns (Score:2)
As if no executives are ever married to any men whatsoever? What a clodly thing to say.
In an East Asian conglomerate?! You know, now that I think about it, the main reason has jumped the shark is because it's largely achieved its mission... but that's only over here. It still might serve a purpose in Korea, however... can we get them to take it off our hands? Everybody would benefit.
Re: As the 'dot turns (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
As if no executives are ever married to any men whatsoever?
~25 years ago? Probably not.
root causes (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Summary (Score:3)
Expected late working hours... Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours... overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars....Even kids are in on the ingrained culture - they go to cram schools into the late hours past midnight,
So what you are saying here is that Samsung is already a tech startup.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
In the previous decade I worked for what was probably the 2nd most important American office for a major European telco. I don't like to name them because frankly they don't deserve any publicity, not even bad publicity, after they way they have treated their American employees over the years. Once I got sent to our HQ office in Europe and my co-workers were very honest with me and told me that almost every day they worked 10 hours or more, but the last 2-3 hours were a complete waste of time. They were
Re: (Score:2)
The Korean drama Misaeng / Incomplete Life [viki.com] does a great job of capturing some of the pressures of Korean office culture. I was drawn into it because the main character was once an aspiring Go professional and there are frequent references to the game throughout the show, but the office drama is really the centerpiece of the show.
Re: (Score:1)
Ha, I remember an anecdote I read a long, long time ago about an American office manager in Japan (which I assume is relatively rare).
He liked to work late and this was causing a lot of tension in the office because, as you say, nobody wanted to leave before the office manager.
He solved the problem, at quitting time he would put on his jacket, pick up his briefcase, walk out the door and take a leisurely stroll around the block.
When h
Re: root causes (Score:2)
An aircraft carrier... (Score:2)
An aircraft carrier can go fast enough so that you could water-ski behind it. It can launch more planes than some country's entire air forces. It almost certainly has some gun emplacements and many sailors with small arms. If pirates in speedboats attack it, they are toast... but not because the carrier out-maneuvers them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. The pirates are startups. The employees could be pirates though, if they quit and joined startups. The penalty for doing that would be considerably less severe than deserting the US Navy and joining pirates.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I guess if we're going to extend the analogy a bit... allied nations and whatever ships they provide, or actual international laws that allow them to use deadly force to stop the pirates. As always, if it mapped perfectly it wouldn't be an analogy. It would be the thing we're talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
What kind of legal team does the aircraft carrier have?
Remember that part about "It almost certainly has some gun emplacements and many sailors with small arms." Legal team in its most primitive form.
We're a Startup! (Score:3)
Everyone work 60-80 hour weeks (as on-call for those "budding business emergencies") and take a 30% pay cut!
Re: (Score:2)
Also, your stock/stock options have no market value.
Examples (Score:2)
"Other moves in recent years to ease a rigid corporate culture include flexible working hours, a loosening of dress code requirements for weekend work and less pressure on employees to attend after-work drinking sessions that have long been a staple of Korean corporate life."
Loosening of dress code for weekend work? Somewhat less pressure for mandatory binge drinking? Wow, thanks!!! [bows vigorously]
Re: Examples (Score:2)
a loosening of dress code requirements for weekend work
Anyone else seeing the irony?
Re: (Score:2)
"Other moves in recent years to ease a rigid corporate culture include flexible working hours, a loosening of dress code requirements for weekend work and less pressure on employees to attend after-work drinking sessions that have long been a staple of Korean corporate life."
Loosening of dress code for weekend work? Somewhat less pressure for mandatory binge drinking? Wow, thanks!!! [bows vigorously]
I'm not going to believe it until they loosen the dress code requirements for compulsory after-work drinking sessions.
Give Up on Authoritarian Ways? (Score:1)
Like by locking the bootloader on the S7 and S7 Edge? Is that our example of less authoritarian ways?
New Corporate madate. Work from bottom up! (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that they think they can change the culture to not be so hierarchical by sending down orders to be less hierarchical is kind of amusing.
When South Korea hired themselves a Dutch coach for their 2002 World Cup national team, he quickly discovered that there was an ingrained culture of deference that was really difficult to combat. I believe he eventually had to kick most of the veterans off the team to get his whole team on an equal social footing.
In the case of a large company, I don't think that's really an option. I'm not sure how they could combat that. Heck, I'm not even convinced a native Korean upper-level manager could even wrap their mind around the problem.
It's a phase (Score:3)
None of these "lean and nimble" things end up working out in the idealized, hoped-for way. I've been at a few mega-large corporations and even some medium sized ones that had developed a massive bureaucracy and an authoritarian culture. You don't change that overnight. I know a lot of long-tenure IBMers who have 2 full time jobs -- their real job and the internal political navigation job. Microsoft is like this now. GM is like this. Even if you went through with a chainsaw and cut all the management layers off the org chart, the business just wouldn't function without radical mind-shifts on everyone's part.
This is some McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group pre-packaged consulting engagement that got sold to the board. I'll bet they came in with the same PowerPoints they used on the last one, with the logo changed. This usually involves one or more of the following:
- Encouraging "collaborative workspaces" by adopting open-plan offices and removing personal space, replacing it with white, pink and green Ikea office furniture
- Rearranging management deck chairs, maybe by getting rid of 1 or 2 layers
- Forcing managers to establish things like open door policies
- Hundreds of hours of trainings and meetings on the new collaborative, startup-inspired Samsung
Nothing else will change, I guarantee it. Korean work culture is like Japanese work culture -- authoritarian is putting it mildly when discussing management style. The idea is nice, but you can't run a huge corporation whose employees depend on its continued existence as a startup. There's just too much chance some hotshot MBA in some division will end up tanking the whole thing. I've been at companies where it has somewhat worked out, but only after the company realizes they're still huge and bureaucratic, and focuses on getting individual teams to work better together.
I hear they are asking KPCB to fund them... (Score:2)
I hear they are asking KPCB to fund them... begging for money? Now THAT'S a startup!
They need it (Score:2)
I had friends that started working in Samsung. They aren't friends anymore. The company grinds down employees till they break and you either take it or bail. Maybe the compensation is amazing, who knows.
There Will Be Blood (Score:2)
I wish them the best of luck, and no doubt they are right about the problems of their management culture.
But this sort of thing is invariable ugly. Like modifying an aircraft in mid-flight. When making the changes you usually get the worst of both worlds, for quite awhile. This can drive an organization to complete failure. Small organizations have better luck at this.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish them the best of luck, and no doubt they are right about the problems of their management culture.
But this sort of thing is invariable ugly. Like modifying an aircraft in mid-flight. When making the changes you usually get the worst of both worlds, for quite awhile. This can drive an organization to complete failure. Small organizations have better luck at this.
"All employees are required to abandon authoritarian culture now. Any employee who deviates from this rule will earn a verbal warning, followed by a written warning and possibly termination if such behavior continues. Supervisors are required to monitor their direct reports for adherence to this new improved culture and intervene when appropriate non-authoritarian behavior is not evident."
A good step (Score:3)
I'll admit to being pretty excited if Samsung can actually make this work. Samsung's excellence in product manufacturing has long been hampered by poor product vision, scattershot branding and marketing strategies, and a general lack of being on the same wavelength when it comes to anticipating what features consumers will actually want and use.
If acting like a startup can help them shed these shortcomings, we can expect to see some exciting products coming out of Samsung in the next six to twelve years. That should be just in time for when Apple comes down off the revenue bubble presently sustained by its perpetual, but largely uninteresting, product updates.
Sociopaths running everything (Score:2)
Sociopaths are running nearly everything. A Samsung CEO isn't content making tens of millions of dollars a year; he needs to make billions overnight, like the Zuckerbergs and Brins. So who cares that 90% of startups fold, and that 99.999% will never see the fluky success of the big IPOs. Who cares that there's no logic or skill behind those flukes; no revolutionary ideas, just being the lucky SOB with the right incremental idea at the right time with the right suckers. Who cares that startups are lean becau
Does this mean no more locked down hardware? (Score:2)
So, if they're going to behave more like a startup, does that mean that they're no longer going to make it difficult to customize their Android phones? Last time I checked, they were still locked down such that you cannot write to the boot loader and that means no rolling your own Android or using Cyanogenmod.
Sure Samsung. 8 days early with this announcement? (Score:2)
Haguksik Saeopche aningunyo... (Score:2)
As someone with extensive experience in (*South* !) Korea, I'll note that this whole concept sounds as Korean as eating Corn Flakes mixed with kimchi.
Good luck with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Samsung didn't get the memo that 90% of Startups fail, typically min more than 4 yrs.
These types of moves are drastic and indicates a company has too much free money.
somebody upstairs reads Wired or Fast Company too much.
It's such a small thing Samsung does, (Score:2)
that sets them apart, and above.
I have a Samsung Monitor and when you turn it on the power light goes off. Every other display the power light comes on, my Panasonic Plasma it's a red light set dead center at the bottom of the screen.
Re: (Score:2)
that sets them apart, and above.
I have a Samsung Monitor and when you turn it on the power light goes off. Every other display the power light comes on, my Panasonic Plasma it's a red light set dead center at the bottom of the screen.
well, when you think about it, having a light light up when the screen is on is kind of redundant.
hope it works (Score:2)
It's A Culture Thing (Score:1)
A cultural change will never happen without the likes of a Chairman Lee Kun-hee to lead, and lead, and slash, and lead, and slash, and lead. He truly did lead Samsung from the stone age to modernity by relentlessly demanding the desired behaviour (Quality, Not Quantity) from his underlings and by punishing back-sliders. His shoes are now empty.
Recently I was employed by one of their companies, Samsung Engineering Co., Ltd, and the culture of rewarding ineptitude and of accepting rigid self-serving idiots as