By Jason Lim
Declaring that he will ``take all legal and moral responsibility and truly apologize for causing concern," Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee publicly resigned from the conglomerate that is responsible for 15 percent of South Korea's GDP after being indicted for tax evasion and breach of trust. He then announced a series of reforms that Samsung will undertake in response to the findings by the special prosecutor's office. Apparently, Lee Kun-hee's glorious run as the head of the most powerful business empires in Korea's history has come to an end. For now.
Depending upon which isle you sit in, Lee Kun-hee elicits dramatically different opinions. On one hand, he is the devil incarnate who has fundamentally corrupted and debased the ethical fabric of Korean society in his headlong and ruthless attempt to grow his business empire. On the other hand, he is the far-sighted executive who has overcome incredible odds and led Samsung onto the world stage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the foremost companies of the world.
No matter where you stand on this opinion spectrum, you have to admit that, judging solely from Samsung's point of view, Lee Kun-hee's leadership at the helm has been an extraordinarily effective one. He was a visionary, able to present a vision of the future to his employees that inspired them to greater heights at faster speeds than anyone thought possible.
Who would have thought 20 years ago that Sony executives would be studying Samsung leadership management, instead of the other way around? To dismiss Lee Kun-hee's leadership abilities by burying it in a mountain of allegations and accusations ― while some of them may be true ― is doing a disservice to the leadership lessons that his reign could impart to a future generation of Korean leaders.
Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), one of the earliest American thinkers on leadership, writes that ``Leaders and followers are both following the invisible leader ― common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group … there must be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader."
In a sense, Follett is speaking about the ability of a leader to convince his followers to buy into a certain vision of the future and the world. From such buy-in, the followers derive a sense of common purpose in life with the leader and one another. This common purpose then becomes the basis of everyday decisions, both big and small. This common purpose in a shared vision also acts as glue that binds the followers to the leader, making the group into a cohesive, efficient team that will inevitably be high-achieving.
This is what Lee Kun-hee did so successfully during his reign. Unfortunately, such visionary leadership also carries with it an inherent risk. Exercising effective visionary leadership, so identified with the person of the leader as in the case of Samsung, can be like walking the razor's edge. Slip up and you will bleed.
Because what Follett spoke about visionary leadership, she could very well have been speaking about a cult of personality leadership that becomes inbred, opaque, and ultimately self-destructive. Some might argue that envisioning a business goal is wholly different from envisioning a spiritual, utopian goal promoted by cultish personalities. However, the line between the two goals is not always so clear.
Samsung carefully cultivates an image of Samsung as the de-facto protector of Korean prosperity, a claim not totally without substance. Samsung, with its unrelenting drive towards excellence and conquest of the Japanese competitors, will protect the Korean people from the devastating poverty of just a few decades ago and allow all Koreans to partake in the prosperity that only an innovative and unique company like Samsung can provide.
Samsung is not presenting itself as just a business-market ownership and profitability are linked into a vision of the Korean nation itself. Furthermore, Samsung creates a new vocabulary that reinforces its sense of its own key role ― Samsung Man is even now used ubiquitously in Korea to denote a forward-looking, innovative leader. Even more, Samsung creates a sense of the other in the Japanese competitors, propelling the employees and researchers to work ever harder to maintain the edge. In fact, Samsung manager training is so steeped with such dogma that it's even called ``Lee Kun-heeism.''
Presenting an attractive, self-important vision of the future and the world, reinforced by redefining or creating vocabulary words to fit into one's role in that vision, and creating a sense of the other based on pre-existing national or ethnic divisions can be either great executive leadership or destructive cult-of-personality leadership. The only way to make sure that it's the former and not the latter is to develop a corporate governance system of multi-dimensional transparency and accountability. These are the two pillars that Korea's next leap forward into global economic leadership must be based on.
In that sense, Lee Kun-hee's decision to step down and implement reforms of his company could be the best thing that he could do to preserve his unique leadership legacy and transform Samsung's leadership from one driven by a visionary person to one propelled by a visionary governance system that is fair, inclusive, and transparent.
Jason Lim is a research fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute, researching Asian leadership models. He can be reached at jasonlim@post.harvard.edu.