By Oh Young-jin
For about an hour and a half, while speaking with a team of reporters from BusinessFocus, The Korea Times’ weekly magazine, Park Yong-maan, CEO and chairman of Doosan Corp., seemed to defy the stereotypical image of the head of a chaebol, Korea’s family-oriented conglomerates.
In his downtown office, the 56-year-old, third-generation leader of the nation’s oldest company failed to match the common image of a big business owner. By neither wearing a suffocating tie that usually finishes an expensive wardrobe nor propagating Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” maxim, Park exemplified a uniqueness that distinguishes him from the rest.
He described himself as a “businessman after all,” during the interview, but his goal is not simply making money for money’s sake. Although he feels a strong responsibility to carry on his family business, he firmly believes in creating more jobs and planning to expand overseas. He aspires to make Doosan a “truly global company with Korean origins.”
He has presented his image as a modern and savvy CEO.
He twits and carries an iPad. His microblog has a lot of followers.
On our visit to his office for the interview on Feb. 21, one thing was conspicuous by their absence ― clocks.
Asked why he didn’t have a visible clock anywhere in his office, Park retorted, “Why do I need one?”
This created an opportunity for us to guess. He was otherwise forthcoming, sometimes answering before we even asked the questions.
When we met, he wasn’t wearing a wristwatch and he might not need a clock on the wall or on his desk to tell him the time because he could rely on his many electronic gadgets. He often twirled the rosary ring on his right index finger as if he was gauging the passage of time.
Or he could use the waning sun.
Large windows on either side of his office allow one to see day turn into night. One can tell time by the amount of light. This special skill is handy as Park is an avid photographer with some framed pictures on the wall testifying to an adroit manipulation of light. “I like light and warmth,” he said.
But more obvious than the lack of a timepiece in his office was that Park was an open book, feeling at ease and speaking from the heart, certain of what he wants and how he will go about getting it.
It didn’t take long to recognize his sense of purpose.
“Whoever is successful at making things work, I will try and emulate” he said.
That whoever could be Apple’s Steve Jobs or the late Lee Byung-chull, Samsung founder and one of Korea’s best-known first-generation business tycoons, the names he gave as examples.
Practicality is another of Park’s characteristics.
Asked which he cherished more as a guiding principle between organizational harmony and efficiency, Park said, “Management requires a lot of different things. A manager shouldn’t take one at the exclusion of the other. I switch from one to the other, depending on what my organization needs.”
Whether or not he likes it, he sounded a lot like Lee Kun-hee, when the Samsung leader told his executives to “change everything except your wives and children.” Park said it in no less stark terms.
Park also possesses a keen sense of reality.
He is fully aware of the limitations when doing business in Korea and when trying to go global.
“We may have a lot of people like Jobs among our ranks,” he said, stating that Koreans have their own, Confucian version of schadenfreude, which discourages one from standing out.
The barrier, he said, is that the small size of the market in Korea actually nips good, lucrative ideas in the bud. “We don’t have as many built-in tools the way big markets do that help to nurture concepts into viable businesses,” he said.
We know there are many examples, such as the “Cyworld” social networking site and “i-river” MP3 players among them.
Overall a spirit of challenge pervades Park’s personality.
Asked how he plans to overcome these “small-market” obstacles, Park, who helped Doosan transform from a liquor maker to a heavy-industry firm by selling 18 firms and buying 15 responded, “We go global rather than waiting for others to come to our market. At the end of the day, I want Doosan to be a multinational with Korean origins.”
He said that his passport to globalization is a willingness to learn from other multinationals that have already crossed multiple borders. Although, he said, “There are few precedents for the way that Doosan intends to go,” meaning that he is not about to stick to the beaten path.
Here is my personal take. When he talked about globalization, the word didn’t sound as banal as it should have. The enthusiasm he expressed seemed contagious, and I hope that he will take Korea’s oldest surviving conglomerate on an exciting adventure around the world.