Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to 'inject a sense of crisis'
theverge.comI hate Koreans for doing this to other Koreans. I will never ever get over how koreans basically turned the whole country into hell joseon and there is no escape. Korea would be a much better place if they allowed themselves some slack.
A small country that effectively operates as an island with angry nuclear-armed neighbors and no natural resources has figured out how to survive in the world through the skills nurtured within its own people.
South Korea doesn't have the privileges that Canada and Finland both have of friendly adjacent neighbors and natural resources, which provide opportunities when Nortel and Nokia respectively stopped succeeding in the marketplace.
That being said, there have been terrible knock-on effects from this societal policy. Brutal work culture, low birth rates and much more.
>friendly adjacent neighbors
As a Finn I laughed out loud.
Not a Finn, but I found it quite funny too. There were so many other example countries, but they choose to pick to one with a neighbor that is constantly in an active war and has a huge nuclear arsenal.
Finland has friendly neighbors? There is a good reason why they have a draft. A simple check of who is on the other side of their largest border combined with any history book from the last 400 years would suggest the reason.
Well swedes would love nothing more than some "empire strikes back" :D
Koreans believe they can brute force their way to success but during the last 10year these policies have been failing them.
It does not help that they are naturally fatalists so its always all or nothing scenario.
IMO it hasn't been failing them, it's kept their nose just above the waterline. Reality is SKR (and JP/TW etc) are developed countries with high tertiary enrollment that have nearly maximized their demographic potential in the sense that they can't really produce more skilled talent to fill what is being lost without immigration. Which would be hard since they can't compete with Anglo countries for same talent pool. So folks in globally competitive industries (like Samsung) are pressured to work 200% harder to squeeze 10% competitive advantage to prevent their shit from getting kicked in. US sanctioning PRC, whose minting OECD combined in talent and starting to compete in tech/hardware brough SKR/JP/TW some time (remember when Huawei was about to stomp Samsung), but the tides are against them.
PRC got similar problem, but it's more they're producing too much talent than opportunties so involution happens. With like 50m more STEM + skilled labour on the way to add the the competition. But one saving grace is PRC has like 150 cities with over a million people that folks can fuck off too and still have decent quality of life. You can always lay flat and chill in a tier2/3 city nearly as vibrant as Seoul/Tokyo/Tapei with less cost of living. SKR/TW and somewhat JP is kind of fucked in that sense, most of the opportunities are in a few geopgraphic grinders where you have to be.
being life-or-death micromanaged by imperial Japanese tends to leave some marks
Finland has very few natural resources, mainly just forests. And the forestry industry experienced a major decline around the same time as Nokia did.
And there is a long border with Russia, one of the worst neighbours any country could have.
Finland had 1 thing: nokia, and microsoft destroyed it.
Looking at most relevant data it is hard to make an argument the Nokia is doing worse today that it was just before Microsoft bought it. Nokia's market cap is currently close to double what it was compared to the year before Microsoft 'destroyed' it.
But count in % of phones that exist, and see how many pople of the current nokia work in finland.
By the time Microsoft stepped in, Nokia's mobile phone market share had already plummeted, and they'd cut their Finish work force to probably a third of what it was at its peak. Yes Nokia is a shadow of its former self, but most of that happened before Microsoft [0].
Hell if you really wanted to you might even be able to make an argument that, with hindsight, Microsoft saved Nokia by letting it gracefully jettison it's failing phone business, get a much needed cash injection, and refocus on other parts of its business.
[0] Of course some argue that Microsoft actually took over the day Elop became CEO, and everything he did was part of some plan to sink Nokia so that Microsoft could buy its phone business on the cheap.
Their downfall happened the day they decided go all in on Windows Phone instead of Android.. And that was 100% Elop doing..
But i don't believe it was a grand plan from MS to screw Nokia so they could buy it..
Some even suspect that MS just bought Nokia because Windows phone was not selling and Nokia was loosing money, so MS was afraid Nokia would turn to Android and they would loose their flagship devices..
So they needed to ensure a phone maker for Windows Phone and wanted go into making their own phones, Nokia had a good brand that they had a good relationship with and Elop was still there to make things easy..
On the other hand, if Nokia had focused on Android from the start or at least had devices on both systems, they had the potential to be the leaders on Android phones by now..
Remember that nokia was already selling linux phones before it switched to windows.
It was a costly and useless move.
Finland’s largest land border by far is with Russia which is not generally viewed as that of a friendly neighbor.
The border between Finland and Russia is 1,340 kilometers (832 miles). The border between South Korea and North Korea about 250 kilometers (155 miles). Also 5.5M people vs 55M people.
There are few countries in Europe with more in common with South Korea than Finland. For them, Russia is as China is to S. Korea and Sweden is what Japan is to S. Korea.
This is reflected in the structure of their armed forces. Per capita, they have the largest army in Nato if they mobilize.
That last part is a little bit of an understatement. With South Korea's birth rate at 0.8(!) they're effectively extinct in five generations. Economic and technical success can come and go, eliminating your biological and material basis for existence is the only non-negotiable thing if survival is what you're interested in. And it's a cliff. You can dig yourself out of a recession in a decade or two, once you've cratered your demographics you're done for the foreseeable future, because even if you raise the birth rate back to replacement, your cohort of young people in absolute terms is now so small is doesn't even make much of a difference.
Finland has Russia as a neighbor.
Aren't Japan and China very similar? They are all societies where the group is valued as more important than the individual.
I’m not so sure about that.
I would say Chinese society values the family… people don’t really give a shit about others outside of family or friends.
My feeling on Japan is that they value their society and country much higher.
But I’m neither Chinese nor Japanese so take that with a grain of salt.
To a westerner, all east Asian people look alike. To an east Asian person, all white westerners look alike.
I would estimate that Japanese differ from Chinese to a similar degree that Russians differ from Spaniards.
Executives are often always working as the job can be demanding, but I think it is a real step backwards to make that the culture of the whole company. People need to be able to live their private lives, outside of working. And in creative work, productivity won’t increase with more hours - at best you can pull off a short term increase like if you’re getting ready to ship something. But beyond that, it’s counterproductive and naive leaders may end up rewarding people who make their extra hours visible over people who actually add value.
Also, crises makes people think less. They'll make more decisions without thinking. I don't think this will end well.
I was thinking that despite I prefer iPhones, their SSDs were pretty good. I guess getting some of their 980s and 990s recently was a good investment for my (personal) IT budget. If they push people like this, I bet their products will become worse, not better.
Samsung is already known for its culture of over-work. This is just getting more and more extreme.
I've been reading Cal Newport's stuff on Deep Work and Digital Minimalism and have some of his other books on my to read list. Considering the stuff he talks about and his new book on slow productivity, this move seems like a really bad idea. I'm curious to see the outcome of this.
I've adopted a more deliberate, focused work day and already seeing some improvements in my work quality, energy, and creativity.
Cal Newport has his theories, Samsung executives have theirs. Samsung executives' theories about how to run Samsung are more valuable than Cal Newport's because they know Samsung better than he does.
That’s such a weird take. It’s like saying that I know more about repairing my car than the mechanic because I drive it every day. That the executives of Samsung run the company doesn’t mean that they are experts in how the brains of their employees work.
Cal Newport is a self help author. He's not comparable to a mechanic. Samsung executives are working there. They are mechanics.
Are taxi drivers mechanics because they work in and with their cars all day?
And while it’s not inaccurate to call Newport a self help author, he has studied, thought, and written about the subject for many years.
Cal Newport is very much into doing mentally demanding work, which arguably cannot be sustained for a huge amount of time.
Managers... well... sitting and talking in meetings, that you can do call day. So yeah, plan some extra meetings in the weekend, no problem.
If that will help things will be another question.
It's why I said I am curious to see the outcome of this. Will it help the company or damage it? We'll see.
Similar to what Musk did at Twitter with his “extremely hardcore” directive.
Maybe we’ll soon see Samsung executives post pictures of how they’re sleeping under their office desks on a Saturday night, like happened at Twitter.
The manager who posted those pictures was laid off from Twitter anyway a few months later. Performative crisis mode probably isn’t very useful to anyone.
It feels like corporate cargo cult behaviour to me. If everyone makes the right theatrical gestures at working super hard, productivity must go up right? Or not.
Maybe it will appease the gods of the stock market for a while.
It certainly makes it easier to fire people, which may be the whole point here
Why the heck would anyone want to “inject the sense of crisis” into their company? That invariably leads to short term thinking and epic fails. Inject calm confidence instead.
Yes, this also sounds crazy to me: "Manage more and faster!".
If my company would be in crisis, I would take the upper management into a quiet retreat, and then have a few meetings where we think creatively how we're going to deal with the situation.
This is really about making the right decisions, not "Manage more and faster or we're all going to die!".
The beatings will continue until moral improves
How does working harder solve "rising borrowing costs and oil prices and a rapid depreciation of Korean currency"? Those are all exogenous factors.
Working harder at something will create better outcomes. There is a lot to think about, mitigate, deal with. The more time you put on something, the better the results.
For example, your crops are getting attacked by insects. It's exogenous yet if you wake up in the night to come out and kill them, you'll save more crops.
> The more time you put on something, the better the results.
You'll rarely get worse results but it doesn't guarantee better results.
Which is exactly the sort of calculus that leads to people pushing so hard they actually do get worse results. See also: crunch culture.
> The more time you put on something, the better the results.
So if I manually do a task rather an automate it, my results will be better?
Ugh - the “burning platform”. Is it ever used authentically? Does it ever go well? I do believe that its typically inauthentic use is mostly self-defeating – people can smell inauthenticity a mile away.
Elsewhere on this topic someone wrote
> Only for executives? Sounds like a good move actually.
There's plenty of folks who fall for this, hook, line and sinker. There's plenty of Elon stans out there who actually believe he works 120 hour work weeks.
Maybe if using Twitter while you own it counts as working there.
Maybe it's a kind of test where how and what you do during it is evaluated, not the stated objectives of fighting fire for the business. But as another comment pointed out with twitter execs sleeping under desks, even they got fired.
Perhaps it's not even a test but a kind of warning that layoffs of managers will happen regardless. Given that, what would game suggest as an optimal playing strategy?
They should send the executives a pet hornet so they can also have a sense of continuous anxiety about the angry buzzing stingy thing in their room.
The source (per HN guidelines - in the article) is: https://www.kedglobal.com/corporate-strategy/newsView/ked202... .. posted 5 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40081798
More of the same, that's the solution right? When what you're doing isn't working. Brilliant.
... because what everyone really needs is for their executives to have a sense of crisis. I'm sure that will help a lot.
The more panicked and overworked the top layers are, the better the decisions they make. Clearly. /s
Does anyone have a theory why Korean currency is depreciating?
I'll take a stab, not much knowledge of the specifics.
Relatively high household and govt debt levels + anaemic growth causing central bank to lag on increasing rates to the level that the market sees as worthy of the risk.
Am I close? It's the AUD model but I figure it's close.
It's all about monetary policy, Japan is also affected by this as their interest rates are out of sync with North America, pushing people to leave the local currency to pursue higher interest rates in US Dollars.
Most real executives already work seven days a week anyway.
yeah, because nothing makes you want to work - and work good - if not a "sense of crisis"
Only for executives? Sounds like a good move actually.
Helping the boss is always on "voluntary basis" (aka there is no choice)...
The shit trickles down. I foresee Saturday morning meetings for their direct reports, etc until everyone works 6 days, or signal themselves as disloyal non team players.
It's a pity managers see themselves as "up". They should see themselves as below the engineers and accountants and whatever. Managing is a supporting role if done properly. The boss mentality is corrosive.
As we say at home: "fallen upwards due to lack of weight."
Manager needs to access/modify the compensation information for the employee. Employee will never see the compensation info of the manager. This is why the manager will always be seen as being above.
That seems like a pretty big leap. Here in Sweden anyone can ask the state for the total income for anyone else at any time, so clearly that's not the case.
I tend to sympathise with this view. The "up" part is only justified if responsibility also falls on their shoulders when shit hits the wall due to their decisions.
Why do you see support being down? You can support from above
Like a house, or a bridge. Yea, a bridge can be a suspension bridge but it ALSO has MOST of the support below the road.