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Sat, December 15, 2018 | 05:38

Opinion > Columnists > Jason Lim >

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

Everything is certified these days. From used cars, massages and organic foods to program management and cyber security, certification is a ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious term that denotes a certain level of quality, authenticity, truthfulness, expertise, and everything good about the product or person. In fact, there are certifications that certify other certification processes so as to certify their capability to certify things in a certifiable way. It’s certifiably crazy sometimes. Granted, certification is oftentimes useful way for potential consumers to lessen their chances of buyin...

Jason Lim | 2017-03-31 16:48

Overcoming Korea's founder's syndrome

Many organizations experience the founder’s syndrome, in which a charismatic founder establishes a successful company on the power of his personality but ultimately becomes an impediment to the growth of the organization because of his need to remain in absolute control or misuse of the organization for personal gain. Most often, accountability and transparency are subverted by the founder himself through the use of nepotism, abusive leadership, and demands for personal loyalty that rivals those reserved for religious cults. Unless the founder’s syndrome can be overcome, it will prove to be ...

Jason Lim | 2017-03-17 16:58

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

Back in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia. In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, every...

Jason Lim | 2017-03-03 16:39

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

A few months ago, I wrote about two widespread cognitive biases about North Korea that tend to mislead us when making policy decisions about North Korea. One, that North Korea is a one-party, socialist dictatorship like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, with internal decision-making dynamics similar to what we see in those systems. Wrong. North Korea is still essentially a monarchy with hereditary kings who rule in conjunction with a tight-knit group of elites mostly interrelated by blood and whose original elite stature was given through their forefathers’ participation in the origi...

Jason Lim | 2017-02-17 17:17

Angelina Jolie is both right and wrong

Angelina Jolie published an oped in the New York Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s Executive Order restricting travel from certain countries. Jolie writes, “The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders. Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”

Jason Lim | 2017-02-03 16:24

Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

A few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behavior on the part of riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”

Jason Lim | 2017-01-20 16:24

Just a Gangnam ajumma?

Kim Chong-in, the well-known economist who led the Democratic Party’s win in the last April’s parliamentary election as the interim president, recently said that Choi Soon-sil was nothing but a “Gangnam ajumma” who happened to subvert the whole governance process as a trusted confidant of President Park Geun-hye.

Jason Lim | 2017-01-06 17:30

Cognitive bias in negotiating with N. Korea

I’ve been a Korea watcher for a long time in formal and informal capacities.

Jason Lim | 2016-12-23 15:55

Unbearable Banality of Park's Evil

When Sewol sank in April 2014, it became apparent that the cozy relationships among the regulatory agencies, industry watchdogs, and safety inspection organizations all led to cursory safety checks that allowed for the design change and even gave Sewol good safety marks in February. Supposedly, it took an average of only 13 minutes for each ship when a four-person inspection team checked the condition of 36 ferries last year.

Jason Lim | 2016-12-09 17:00

Divided Families in US

Early in 1950, my Dad was all set to go to Moscow University School of Medicine on a full scholarship. Then the Korean War started in June of 1950. A few months after that, along with tens of thousands of fellow North Koreans, my Dad escaped to the South as U.N. forces retreated in the face of a furious counterattack by the People’s Army of China in the winter of 1950.

Jason Lim | 2016-11-25 16:58

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