Lee Jae-yong's 'culture innovation' begins at Samsung

[THE INVESTOR] Samsung Electronics announced measures to establish a parallel corporate culture in its “culture innovation” drive on June 27.

In March, the company announced that these measures will be introduced as part of the efforts to adopt the drive and open nature of start-up firms.

The move is driven by Samsung Electronics vice chairman Lee Jae-yong, who wants to shed the company's rigid, top-down culture in an attempt to match pace with Apple and other global competition. 

As part of the measures, Samsung Electronics will simplify the seven-tier staff structure to a four-tier structure, and encourage the employees to refer to each other more casually. Under the plans, employees will call each other by name with the honorific “nim” used as a suffix. The Korean word “nim” can be used with names and titles as an expression of respect and politeness, or as a means to distinguish the differences in two people’s respective social positions.

In addition, only absolutely necessary persons will be required to attend meetings, and reports and briefings will be held in a manner that will require such events to occur only once. Until now, briefings and reports were made separately for different ranks.

Samsung also plans to allow its employees to wear shorts during the summer starting this year, and discourage employees from remaining at work just because their boss is still in the office.

While new for Korea, particularly for large companies, some say the changes will be superficial.

“I can’t really see how this (the changes) will make fundamental changes,” a Samsung employee said declining to be named.

“Really, I think the work I do, and the way I do it will remain pretty much the same no matter what I call the bosses and what other people call me. And I really am not sure if I can call my boss by name, whether or not I attach the word nim.”

By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldcorp.com)