On the third floor of the Time Warner Center in New York, just below Thomas Keller’s $210-a-plate and perpetually booked restaurant Per Se, is Samsung’s equally sleek offering, where you don’t need a reservation. Walk through the glass doors that look out onto Columbus Circle, pass by a forest of plasma screens, and you’ll see the future as the Korean electronics giant would have it.
Elegant and austere, the Samsung Experience showroom invites visitors to live, work, and play in a luxurious, fully operational world of network-controlled refrigerators, “hygienic power” vacuum cleaners, nanotechnology-enabled air purifiers, steam-cleaning microwave ovens, ultralight notebook computers, sumo-sized liquid-crystal display TVs, near-silent laser printers, all-in-one digital cameras, and dozens of do-everything cell phones. The place amounts to a temple for the hip and technocentric; on a typical Saturday, it draws more than 1,500 acolytes.
Twelve years ago, Samsung’s enigmatic chairman, Kun-Hee Lee, endured a different kind of experience when he visited a decidedly inelegant electronics retailer in Los Angeles. Lee found his company’s products gathering dust on the store’s back shelves, ignored by even the salespeople. American consumers, he realized, regarded the Korean company’s wares as cheap, toylike knockoffs, best suited for the discount bin. Right there, he decided that Samsung’s very survival in the U.S. market was in peril.
Not long after that visit, Lee issued a manifesto to Samsung’s top executives, which he later repeated in a book, Change Begins With Me. “Management is still clinging to the concept of quantity at the expense of quality,” he declared. “We will become a third-rate company. . . . We must change no matter what.” He implored workers to “change everything except your wife and family”–a decree that’s still talked about within Samsung. To shatter old work habits, he ordered that henceforth, every Samsung employee must report for work two hours early.
