Doosan's new chairman focuses on "caring" meritocracy

When Park Yong-maan took office as the new chairman of Doosan Group early this month, he vowed to establish a strong corporate culture this year and stressed the need for a "caring meritocracy."

“Doosan has a history of 116 years, but most of our staff have used their Doosan business cards for less than 10 years. And about half of our 39,000 employees around the world are foreigners,” Park said in a press conference in early April.

“We need a strong corporate culture and philosophy to unite the people with a variety of backgrounds.”

The conglomerate is currently in the process of completing a set of criteria that embody a corporate philosophy dubbed the “Doosan Way.”

The envisioned "caring" meritocracy, or a compassionate performance-based evaluation and compensation system, will be at the center of Doosan’s strategy to foster human resources.

A "cold-hearted" meritocracy that arouses endless competition among employees and weeds out those who fall behind cannot produce sustainable progress in the long term, according to Park.

Doosan will seek a “warm” evaluation and compensation system that motivates the staff to contribute towards creating progress by making them feel they are being educated and improved.

“I don’t think compassion and meritocracy are two conflicting concepts. Performance-based evaluation is not about dismissing those who made the least progress in a competition,” Park said.

“Doosan will try to help employees make up for their weak points as we evaluate.”

Park added that a precondition for a caring meritocracy was the company’s constant growth based on excellent products and technologies, calling on the top management to do their best to achieve growth.

Park has always placed priority in human resources and emphasized the importance of communication. The main copy of Doosan Group’s commercial “People are the future” was written by Park himself.

In 1999, when he was chief executive of Doosan Corporation, Park started hiring people with MBA degrees from overseas schools. He still travels abroad to interview them for recruitment, and makes rounds to universities here to hold recruitment seminars.

Park is one of the most popular users of Twitter among college students. He has some 131,000 followers, the second most for a head of a conglomerate after Lee Chan-jin, chief executive of Dreamwiz.

Park has led 42 mergers and acquisitions so far as Doosan transformed from a food and beverage business to a global infrastructure support business based on heavy industries.

He said, however, there won’t be new M&As for the time being.

Doosan is eying an M&A opportunity in the manufacturing sector, but it won’t happen until 2016, the chairman said during a lecture at a conference hosted by Harvard Business School earlier this month.

By Kim So-hyun (sophie@heraldcorp.com)