Korea's cultural recipe for failure

By Jason Lim

Hierarchical bureaucracy was a social invention created as an efficient means to organize human activities for specific ends. It originated with governments but began to expand rapidly during the Industrial Age to define how work was done in any large organization and firmly took hold as the default power structure for corporations.

As I wrote before, bureaucratic hierarchies excel in coordinating and controlling resources across relatively stable systems. When objectives are clear within a consistent environment, coordination through hierarchy has been the preferred method of organization. Bureaucratic hierarchies handle problems by decomposing them and isolating them for efficiency while controlling them from a centralized power base.

Such an organizing principle is effective in an environment which experiences little change but a huge hindrance when the environment is dynamic and asymmetrical; bureaucracies reward obedience and diligence, not initiative, experimentation, and imagination that are essential for today’s hyperkinetic and hypercompetitive environment. Moreover, you can enforce obedience and diligence but can’t compel employees to be imaginative and innovative ― these are natural byproducts of an engaged workforce, which a hierarchical bureaucracy doesn’t naturally produce.

As Gary Hamel writes in Mashup Blog, “(bureaucracy) is well-suited to a world in which change meanders rather than leaps. But in a hyperkinetic environment, it is a profound liability. A formal hierarchy overweights experience and underweights new thinking, and in doing so perpetuates the past. It misallocates power, since promotions often go to the most politically astute rather than to the most prescient or productive.

It discourages dissent and breeds sycophants. It makes it difficult for internal renegades to attract talent and cash, since resource allocation is controlled by executives whose emotional equity is invested in the past… You can’t endorse a top-down authority structure and be serious about enhancing adaptability, innovation or engagement.”

Hamel argues that an organization needs to examine its founding assumptions in order to truly remake itself fit for the future in today’s hyperkinetic environment. He terms these as the organization’s ideology and architecture, the change of which is essential to create an organization better adapted for today’s world: “Until we challenge our foundational beliefs, we won’t be to build organizations that are dramatically more capable than the ones we have today. Despite our best efforts, we will fail to build organizations that are as nimble as change itself. We will fail to make innovation an instinctual and intrinsic capability. We will fail to inspire extraordinary contributions from our colleagues and employees. If we’re serious about tackling the core incompetencies that afflict our organizations, we have to start by scrutinizing the architecture and ideology of modern management.”

When we examine South Korea’s organizational ideology and architecture, it’s pretty damning and speaks ill to her potential to transition to a “creative economy.”

South Korea’s ideology was well-established during its headlong rush towards modernization since the Korea War and can be summed up as, “growth at any cost.” It was a natural sentiment born out of centuries of chronic poverty punctuated by the brutal colonial occupation by Imperial Japan. One of the better known slogans of President Park Chung-hee’s well-known Saemaeul Movement was, “Let’s live well for once.”

However, as we saw in the Sewol Ferry disaster, “growth at any cost” inevitably does have costs that are difficult to accept. Deification of material goods, putting profits before people’s welfare, equating net worth with a person’s respectability, and turning a blind eye towards anything that might impede a “fast and faster” philosophy of development are symptoms of the ideology that drives South Korean society today.

What about South Korea’s organizational architecture? Well, it’s one huge, traditional bureaucracy. From the central government to the corporations to schools, it’s defined by the following classic recipe for a bureaucracy: “Strategy gets set at the top. Power trickles down. Big leaders appoint little leaders. Individuals compete for promotion. Compensation correlates with rank. Tasks are assigned. Rules proscribe actions. Managers assess performance.”

This isn’t just the organizational architecture. Combined with the governing ideology, this is South Korea’s cultural architecture as well. How we are driven to behave affects how we learn to think and feel; and how we think in such cultural architecture is all about command and control since that’s what the system is designed to do and rewards those who do it better than others.

South Korea reinforces this culture through the mandatory military training for all her young men ― who will most likely become the future leaders since South Korea ranked 111th in the world’s gender gap index ― through which hierarchical bureaucracies are literally instilled at the point of a gun.

By design, such cultural architecture lacks governance, accountability, and transparency since only the top few are allowed to make any decisions of significance as priests of the ideology and keepers of the bureaucracy. And their natural instincts will be to maintain the status quo by using the bureaucracy to force everyone to conform in order to minimize irregularities, which by another name is called innovation and change.

Worse, such architecture is dehumanizing and disempowering, forcing away imaginative and innovative employees from the organization. And without them, who will drive the “creative economy” that will save South Korea from the future?

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.