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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

You graduated. Now choose!

By Jason Lim This is graduation season in America. And I am sure that all you new graduates have been inundated by questions from family and friends asking: “How do you feel?” Then they would probably proceed to tell you exactly how you should feel by saying: “You must feel excited; you must feel great; you must be filled with such hope for the future.” Well, I am sure you wish you could tell them that you have a job lined up and could afford to move out of your parents’ house. The recession isn’t helping, is it? But despite all the doom and gloom, you should feel excited and hopeful for the future. At the same time, you should also be scared to death at the uncertainties facing you and humbled by the choices that you know you will have to make. And that’s exactly why you should be scared, because you have so many choices that, once made, will continue to affect you long after they have been made with consequences that could go far beyond your individual lives. Consequences for your families, your organizations, your nation, and your world. By graduating from coll

Jun 22, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Who are they?

By Jason Lim One of the first pieces of advice that I got from a fellow American teacher when I first taught English in Seoul more than 14 years ago was to never get a haircut in a barber shop. Which was as bizarre as unintelligible at the time. If you don’t get a haircut in a barbershop, then where the heck do you go? Being a red-blooded American male raised in the Bronx, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in a beauty parlor getting my hair shampooed and ― God forbid ― styled by someone else. All I wanted was the Korean version of the neighborhood barbershop where old, cantankerous Italian barbers would make sure you ended up looking like Joe DiMaggio or Phil Rizzuto no matter what your own preference was. But I found out quickly enough that I got some good advice. I also found out how prevalent and exposed the supposedly illegal sex trade was in Korea. Prostitution in Korea exists in diverse forms. There are the traditional “red-light districts” in every major and not-so-major cities. There are also the high class saunas and massage parlors in business districts. There

Jun 8, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Young Werther on Twitter

By Jason Lim Everyone has heard about how the explosive popularity of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” in 1774 triggered a wave of copycat suicides by young men throughout Europe who fancied themselves forlorn over an unrequited love. Thank God Young Werther killed himself in an age without social media. Can you imagine the lethal impact that he would have had if he were twitting about his tortured love for Lotte instead of writing long-hand letters to his friend? He would have set a record for the deadliest tweet in history, rivaling the body count of the Black Plague. Forgive me if I am being facetious with something as serious as suicide by young people. But there is something seriously wrong when you are forced to witness a suicide unfolding over the twitter airwaves, which is basically what happened with the suicide by Song Jee-seon, the best-known female sports announcer in Korea. You feel sad over the pain that someone like her must have felt. But you also feel angry. At what, I am not really sure, but I am certain that I am angry as I write this column.

May 25, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Greensboro Four in Jasmine Revolution

By Jason Lim The central question to the recent historic wave of Middle East protests is, “Why now?” I mean, no one could have predicted on Jan. 1 that heretofore stable countries in the Middle East, which has no tradition of democracy or mass political activism, would be the site of one of the most riveting and gratifying demonstrations of activist followership since Corazon Aquino came to power in the Philippines. The injustice and hopelessness that burst forth in the protests were not new; they had been a staple of the region for some time now. Neither were the lone acts of foolhardy bravery or desperate remonstrations that some are giving credit for having ignited the Jasmine Revolution; I am sure countless poor souls had perished unknown in quiet desperation before, unnoticed by the world. So, what was different about this time? What happened this year that created the type of activist followership as opposed to the bystander meekness that we saw in the past? What was the nature of the critical mass that drove the public to organize an active resistance to the tyranny

May 11, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Seo Tai-jis betrayal

By Jason Lim I actually remember watching Seo Tai-ji and the Boys’ debut TV appearance back in the early 1990s. I recall that it was a sort of a competition between new musical acts, with Seo Tai-ji and the Boys taking home the second prize with their song, “I know!” I also remember the judges’ somewhat disparaging comments afterwards, with Seo taking it all with a bittersweet smile that seemed to say, “I know better than you.” Which turned out to be true. There is a Korean adage that you can tell the future health of a tree by the look of its sprout. Well, Seo’s sprout was surely healthy. Soon after their debut TV appearance, Seo Tai-ji and the Boys shot to the top of the charts and turned the Korean pop scene upside down and inside out for the next few years, becoming the closest thing to the Beatles that Korea would probably ever have. Even their breakup a few years later resembled the Beatle’s in its suddenness and finality. And mystery. Despite his nice boy-next-door good looks, Seo was always a bit mysterious, aloof, and seemingly puzzled by the craziness surrou

Apr 27, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Is maternity tourism bad for America?

By Jason Lim A recent New York Times report on Chinese women titled, “Arriving as Pregnant Tourists, Leaving with American Babies,” sparked a heated public debate on the heretofore presumed right for babies born on American soil to claim U.S. citizenship, regardless of whether the parents are American citizens or even legally residing in the U.S. As the title suggests, the article described how wealthy expectant Chinese mothers come to the U.S. on tourist visas for the express purpose of giving birth in the U.S. so that their children could claim automatic U.S. citizenship, which is a right that is constitutionally enshrined by the Fourteenth Amendment, commonly known as the “Citizenship Clause.” This story hit mainstream America like a ton of bricks. Until now, any public awareness of the “problem” of anchor babies centered around poor women from Central America entering the U.S. illegally for work and giving birth while they are here, with the intent for their kids to assimilate into the mainstream American society. But wealthy Chinese women paying thousands of dolla

Apr 13, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Why do we believe Shin Jeong-ah?

By Jason Lim Forget about Libya and the breathtaking fight for freedom that’s playing out with the world as its witness. Even forget about the biggest earthquake in Japan in a century that killed over 10,000 and counting, with the ticking bomb of a nuclear disaster waiting in the wings. Forget all that. The news that competed for top honors in Korea the past week had nothing to do with the momentous, historic events happening in the world. But it has everything to do with what Korea is today and what it doesn’t want to be tomorrow. The big news that set every tongue wagging around instant coffee vending machines was that the Chung Un-chan, the former prime minister, invited Shin Jeong-ah to late night drinks to offer her a position as a professor in Seoul National University a few years ago when he was the president of that illustrious institution. In case people forgot, Shin is the former Cinderella of Korea’s arts scene and was appointed to be the joint artistic director of Gwangju Biennale 2008, Korea’s biggest arts event, before it was found out that she had lied ab

Mar 30, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

Gods earthquake

By Jason Lim By now, we have all watched the devastating live feed on Japan’s earthquake and the ferocious tsunami that followed it. It was surreal watching the muddy waters roll inexorably into the cities and knowing that there were hundreds of people being killed right there and then, with nothing that anyone could do prevent it. The seeming invisibility of the violent tragedy that you knew was happening made the experience that much more surreal. It was more than a feeling of helplessness. It was more like a numb sense of despairing inevitability. As I asked a friend, “What can you possible do if you are caught in something like that?” “Nothing,” he replied. “What can you do?” Except pray for both the dead and alive and hope that the people of Japan rediscover that courage and spirit that allowed them to rise from the ashes of World War II to become the second-largest economy in the world and herald the dawning of the Asian century. (Actually, China has recently overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.) True character is revealed when challenged, an

Mar 16, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

How do you change default settings?

By Jason Lim In a recent Harvard Business Review blog article titled, “To Be a Better Boss, Know Your Default Setting,” Linda Hill and Kent Lineback argue that we bring to our workplace the person who we are: “… our likes and dislikes, our preconceived ideas, the peculiar set of values and predispositions we’ve acquired, our unique personalities, values, and experience.” These are our default settings as a person. All these combine in a unique way to create who we are and color our every interaction. This is akin to your computer’s operating system. What’s one of the first things that we do when we buy a new computer? We go into the control panel where the factory-set default settings hide and customize them to our liking so that everything the computer does from then on ― regardless of whatever applications we run ― will be loaded, displayed, and executed according the parameters set by the default settings. But that’s where the similarities stop. The key difference is change. How do you change you default setting? In a computer, it’s a simple matter of a few mou

Feb 21, 2011By Jason Lim
Jason Lim

MADE with China

By Jason Lim During the Cold War, the prevailing paradigm for global political stability was MAD, which stood for mutually assured destruction. It meant that neither side would dare to use nuclear weapons against another because it would invite an assured destruction for everyone. This is what President Jimmy Carter said in 1980 in his Presidential Directive 59, laying out the principles behind MAD. Basically it would mean that the destruction for the aggressor would be so devastating, even with first strike, that war would not be a logical option for self-preservation. It worked. Despite a few close calls like the Cuban Missile Crisis and countless low-level conflicts through third-world proxies ― including North and South Korea ― the U.S. and the Soviet Union never came close to a war. We all know how the first Cold War ended. Since one of the underpinning foundation for MAD was a second strike capability, it led to a high-stakes arms race that eventually drove the Soviet Union to bankruptcy and left the U.S. as the only superpower standing. According to pretty

Feb 7, 2011By Jason Lim
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