The collective must yield

For me, the most fascinating issue that came out of the recently concluded Paris Summer Olympics is the dispute between An Se-young and the Badminton Korea Association.

An, the 22-year-old gold medalist in badminton women’s singles, started the firestorm at her press conference immediately after winning the gold medal, stating that she ensured months of pain and years of unfair treatment to win the gold medal just so that she can have this stage to voice her protest against the association for its poor player management. She brought up several issues having to do with the association’s lack of proper care with the potentially career-threatening knee injury last year. However, as the issue became larger, with even the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism getting into the act, it was obvious that An had an ongoing problem with how the association ran the sport and her opportunity to participate.

According to media reports, An formally lodged a request this past February with the association to address seven issues that ranged from structural to cultural, including a request to stop forcing her to do the laundry and fix the racket netting of older players. When the attempt to address the issue internally was ignored, it seems that An really took it upon herself to win the gold in these Olympics so that she would have the opportunity and standing to publicly drive the change that she wanted to see in how her sport was being managed.

First of all, huge kudos to An. She is preternaturally mature for a 22-year-old, having the courage and perspicacity to leverage the hard-won spotlight to break out of the formal straitjacket that she must have been in since the association had the final say on who should represent the country in the Olympics. Having won the gold medal, the easiest thing that she could have done was to take in the well-deserved glory and lord over the association by leveraging its business-as-usual practices in her favor. However, An chose to risk her future in the sport by naming and shaming the association in public and daring it to come clean and change.

The reason that she was able to do this was that we are living in a world where public access is atomized to the individual, no longer controlled by large institutions with monopolistic hold on the medium of communications. All An needed was the credibility and a platform to ensure that her voice was heard. She knew that the ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok influencers would metastasize her message beyond the reach of the mainstream media, especially a narrative the featured a young athlete who persevered against all odds to bring honor to her nation despite the corruption of the two-faced adults who sought to milk her talents and hard work for themselves. Of course, her gold medal was the catalyst. Nothing brings credibility like winning on the biggest stage of all. Striking while the iron is hot and with the right amount of strength is something that An did masterfully, manipulating the media ecosystem to her full advantage.

An’s incident is the latest sign that Korea is undergoing a creative deconstruction of the social and cultural norms that underpin its rise from the poorest country in the world to the economic and cultural powerhouse it is today. As I repeatedly wrote before, what worked in the past won’t work today. The type of corporatism and labor management that powered the Miracle on the Han River by demanding blind obedience, rigid hierarchy and self-sacrifice for the greater good don’t pass the sniff test in today’s Korea. It’s transitioning from former President Park Chung-hee’s “Let’s all live well together for once” to “What’s in it for me?” Today is all about the celebration of individual talents and creative expressions.

Of course, the old die hard, and the arc of the universe doesn’t bend in any specific direction. It’s just long. This means that the remnants of the old guard, weakened but still powerful, will strike back and try to shame An as a greedy athlete looking out only for herself. Such a communal argument has historically been powerful in trying to rein in a superstar’s rightful demand for better treatment. But it will fail because the very definition of fairness has shifted.

Fairness is no longer about rising tides lifting all boats; it’s about giving dues to whom they're due. We live in a performance-driven world. Our lives are evaluated based on unspoken but very real individualized performance plans that tie our awards and bonuses to metrics that we have achieved and competitors that we have beaten. In this world, it’s more than fair for An to demand differentiated attention and compensation as the leading badminton player in Korea. She is claiming the preeminence of the individual over the collective while demanding that the collective must also be judged for its performance in how well it catered to special individuals like herself. It’s no longer a fair fight. The collective must yield.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.