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Jason Lim

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.

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Jason Lim

Harvard discriminates against Asians?

By Jason LimGrowing up, there was one overriding narrative that all Korean American youngsters were supposed to buy into to succeed in mainstream America. Parents come to the U.S. from Korea to work hard and sacrifice to give their children an opportunity to succeed, which they do by excelling academically to get into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science on their way to an Ivy League school to become a doctor, lawyer or banker. If you fail, you take over your parents’ store, to your everlasting shame.As a 1.5-generation Korean-American, I similarly had four career choices: doctor, lawyer, investment banker or inherit my parents’ dry cleaners, in that order. So, I went to Duke (because I got waitlisted by MIT, thank God) and majored in biomedical engineering, not because I liked biomedical engineering but because people told me it was easier to get into medical school than being a pre-med.Too bad that I realized during my junior year that I faint at the sight of blood. Oh well, so much for being a doctor. Then I decided to be a lawyer specializing in intellectual property because t

Nov 28, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Korea's cultural recipe for failure

By Jason LimHierarchical 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. M

Nov 14, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

The story of Rene's face

By Jason LimAt first, I thought it was a prank. When social media started erupting with Rene Zellweger’s before and after photos a few weeks ago, I thought it was some clever prank gone viral. Until it wasn’t.How could this be Rene Zellweger that I watched grow up on the movie screens from ``Dazed and Fazed” and ``Jerry McGuire” to star turns as the awkward and lovable Bridget Jones? This was a totally different person. She didn’t look anything like the Rene Zellweger that I knew. This new person is attractive enough, but she’s not Zellweger. It was like a reverse possession in that some malevolent imposter took over Rene’s face instead of her soul.Apparently, it wasn’t just me who had this reaction. It was a lot of other people as well, judging from the number of press articles and social media traffic. As the initial incredulity gave way to hesitant acceptance, I wondered why an actress’s personal choice to have cosmetic surgery would leave me with such a sense of displacement, disorientation, or, dare I say, even betrayal? Why

Oct 31, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Creatively destroying economy

By Jason LimRecognizing that Korea has reached the limits of its export-driven economic model, President Park has been championing the expansion of a “creative economy” in Korea based on innovation and entrepreneurship. A key element of this strategy is to create an ecosystem that encourages and nurtures risk-taking for start-up, which is especially challengingin Korea where the huge conglomerates called “chaebol” dominate the playing field.KakaoTalk has been a notable exception to the rule, a feel good story of a homegrown messenger service that quickly grew to dominate the Korean market. In fact, it recently merged with the #2 search engine in Daum to create a combined company called Daum Kakao that valued KakaoTalk at over $3 billion. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call KakaoTalk a prime example of what Park calls creative economy.Unfortunately, it looks like that Park’s government is inadvertently engaging in creative destruction rather than creative economy. Following Park’s comments during the Sep. 16 Cabinet meeting that complained about

Oct 17, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Are Asian men undesirable?

By Jason LimTo its credit, Google has been very transparent about its diversity issues ― 70 percent of Google’s employees are male while 62 percent of its U.S. employees are white while 30 percent are Asian ― and has carefully examined its hiring process and implemented unconscious bias training for its employees.Unconscious bias training is based on the scientific findings that everyone is a little bit racist and sexist. This is not a huge surprise. We are all products of our cultural background and social experiences. We carry deeply ingrained, mostly unconscious stereotypes of how different types of people are supposed to behave in various, predictable ways.Do we clutch our bags more tightly or become more wary when a couple of loud black male teenagers crowd onto the elevator? More so than we would when a bunch of Asian male teenagers with glasses crowd onto the same elevator? Probably.If you were picking players in a playground pickup basketball game and had your pick of black and Asian kids, which one would you pick first? Now say you were picking students for a math comp

Oct 3, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Korea's marshmallow society

By Jason Lim  Pamela Druckman of the New York Times recently recounted a legendary experiment run by Columbia University psychology professor Walter Mischel 50 years ago where he offered a group of five-year olds irresistible treats such as marshmallows, cookies, or candies with a catch; they would get two of the treats if they could resist what was in front of them for 15 minutes.As Druckman writes, "Famously, preschoolers who waited longest for the marshmallow went on to have higher SAT scores than the ones who couldn’t wait. In later years they were thinner, earned more advanced degrees, used less cocaine and coped better with stress.”So, the basic popular narrative that came out of this was that the self-will and discipline you exhibited as a five-year old will have a lasting impact on how well you do with the rest of your life. Kind of scary.The obvious caveat in this narrative, as many have pointed out throughout the years, is that even five-year olds are products of their environment. A five-year old only-child raised in a comfortable environment with loving p

Sep 19, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Does a corporate name change equal a cultural change?

By Jason Lim On Aug. 27, Daum and KakaoTalk shareholders approved a merger of the two companies into a new one that will be called “DaumKakao.” Most analysts believe that this merger is a “no-brainer,” as KakaoTalk’s leading mobile presence in Korea could act as a pipeline for Daum’s content and ads to reach those who are increasingly moving to smartphones and tablets as their main gateway to the Internet.Bloomberg quotes Ahn Jae-min, an analyst at Kiwoom Securities Co., who wrote, “Daum’s value as an Internet portal, its search engine, display advertisement and game businesses create a considerable synergy effect with Kakao’s mobile messenger and mobile service. This will enable them to gain considerable influence over South Korea’s Internet portal market, which has been dominated by Naver for the past decade.”But it’s pretty apparent that reclaiming the Korean market is not the endgame. Korea’s already saturated and rapidly aging market doesn’t provide the needed growth potential. DaumKakao wan

Sep 5, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Children of Sewol, girls of Chibok

By Jason LimApril was a tragic month for children. In Korea, over 300 passengers, mostly students from Danwon High School in Ansan City, were trapped inside a sinking ferry waiting in place with life vests on, as they were told by the crew. They drowned.In Nigeria, more than 200 school girls between 16 and 18 years old were abducted by the Islamist armed group, Boko Haram, from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok in northeastern Nigeria. They have not yet been found.These incidents happened on opposite sides of the world under vastly different political and social economic contexts. However, they both triggered an angry backlash against the governments of Korea and Nigeria, respectively, for their seeming failure to safeguard the lives of their own citizens.In Nigeria, the anger is aimed at the government’s inability to protect the basic human rights of its citizens in ensuring that they have access to safety and education, as well as to find and rescue the girls before they are further victimized by their kidnappers. In Korea, the anger is aimed at the culture of e

May 16, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

But Korean culture is to blame

By Jason Lim When the mainstream media started blaming the Korean culture of obedience as the cause behind the students staying put as the Sewol sank, I thought, “Here we go again,” and immediately came up with several reasons why such analysis is as baseless as it is inane. Anyone who’s lived in Korea would know that Korean teenagers aren’t any less rebellious or independent-minded than their global counterparts. They may show superficial deference to their elders as a part of the larger cultural norm, but that certainly doesn’t mean they are all faceless lemmings living in a cult. As far as I know, Jim Jones wasn’t a Korean.Further, if you are stuck deep inside a listing ship listening to repeated official announcements to stay put, wouldn’t you follow instructions also? In fact, following instructions would probably give you the best chance to make it through alive in most emergency cases. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here due to the inexplicable actions of the ship’s captain and senior crew, who were among the firs

May 2, 2014By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Adultery site unwelcome here

By Jason Lim Recently, the Korean Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) blocked the Korean version of the Canada-based Ashley Madison Internet site in ``light of the legal spirit of relevant laws aimed to protect healthy sexual morals, marriage bonds and family life.”Admittedly, Ashley Madison has positioned itself as the foremost hookup site for married people, with a slogan that unabashedly states, "Life is short. Have an affair.” Since starting in Canada 11 years ago, it now claims over 20 million members worldwide.It has recently turned its eyes to Asia, landing in Japan and Hong Kong recently. It set records in Japan by reaching 1 million members in a little over eight months, and the 80,000 members who signed up in the first month late last year made Hong Kong the most successful launch rate per capita. It seemed on the verge of replicating that success in Korea, with the more than 50,000 members who signed up since its launch last month.That was until KCSC came down with both feet to protect healthy sexual morals in South Korea, a country that has a cultu

Apr 18, 2014By Jason Lim
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