The Seoul of Design

Samsung's success is all the more remarkable given that it was more than a decade in the making. Twelve years ago, Lee dispatched his design adviser, Tamio Fukuda, to assess the state of Samsung design. Fukuda's conclusion: Samsung lacked a design identity; its product-development process was primitive; and its top managers discounted design's value.

In other words, Samsung was not unlike most corporations of the day. To change that, the company put years into building a sustainable design culture--one that is simultaneously innovative and global yet reflective of Korea's ancient culture.

Wired Nation

Today's Korea just might be the most technologically advanced country on earth. More than 75% of its households are wired with high-speed Internet connections, which operate at many times the speed of U.S. broadband. An equal percentage of Koreans own cell phones; Seoul commuters often pass the time watching live, satellite-TV broadcasts on their handsets. For Samsung, the country amounts to one vast lab for testing consumer reactions to bleeding-edge digital technologies.

For all of its striking modernity, though, Korea remains in many ways a traditional society. Over the past 23 centuries, the Korean peninsula was repeatedly conquered and occupied by China, Mongolia, and Japan, each of which left behind its own indelible, cultural imprint. Chief among them is a neo-Confucian mode of thinking that values authority and order above all else. As chairman, Lee commands absolute respect within Samsung; as one designer put it, his pronouncements "are like a page out of the Bible." In one such pronouncement, Lee issued a clarion call for making design a core asset in the company's bid to transform itself: "An enterprise's most vital assets lie in its design and other creative capabilities. I believe that the ultimate winners of the 21st century will be determined by these skills." The quotation, framed, occupies a place of honor in a corner office belonging to Kook Hyun Chung, chief of Samsung's Corporate Design Center. "To hear, from the chairman's own mouth, how much he valued design was absolutely shocking," Chung says.

Lee could issue edicts. He could send a delegation of Samsung executives to the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, to lay plans to launch an in-house design school at Samsung. He could quickly build a $10 million, state-of-the-art facility in downtown Seoul to house the result, the Innovative Design Lab of Samsung, or IDS. And he could add millions more to fund the school's programs and pay the student designers' salaries. But even the Emperor of Samsung couldn't change the corporate mind-set, which was imitative, hypercompetitive, and ultraresistant to change.

Samsung--the name means "three stars" in Korean--was founded by Lee's father in 1938 as an exporter of rice, sugar, and fish. And Samsung, at its core, remained a commodity company well into the 1990s. Many of its managers couldn't--or wouldn't--value design. "Samsung was a technology company whose management thinking came out of exporting rice," says Gordon Bruce, a veteran design consultant who, along with fellow Art Center faculty member James Miho, helped Samsung set up IDS. "There was no design involved. It was all about keeping the price down and outselling the other guy."

When Bruce and Miho, a pioneering graphic designer, audited the state of Samsung design, other problems quickly surfaced: The company's neo-Confucian culture led its designers to imitate the masters of their industry, which at that time were Sony and IBM. The result: Samsung failed to develop a distinctive design identity of its own. The company's middle managers were so competitive that they kept ideas to themselves--"the place was just shark infested," says Bruce--which stymied efforts to create a collaborative, risk-taking environment. And because

Samsung's engineers controlled the product-development process, engineering constraints choked off any notion of design's becoming an end in itself.

Bruce and Miho soon realized that a Western-style curriculum modeled on the Art Center's program would never meet the needs of Samsung's designers. They had to find a way to make managers allies of design. But the biggest challenge of all was to unlearn old, ingrained ways of thinking--to create a new Samsung mind.