A large firm at home, a mid-sized one, and a small shop in Guri

The notes open with a familiar claim: the temperament and the leadership of a chief executive shape a firm’s culture and its strategy, and can decide whether the firm stands or falls. A successful chief executive, they write, wants success badly, accepts the risk that comes with a challenge, and tries to open a new field before others do. Deciding at the right moment, and correcting a choice quickly once it is seen to be wrong, looks like a simple rule, and is one of the hardest things to do on the front line. A lonely dictator-type leader, they add, finds it hard to reverse a decision, and often fails.

Chung Ju-yung, whom the notes say is compared most often with Lee Byung-chul of Samsung, is described as a man of sudden turns of thought, and a forceful one. His motto, “There may be hardship, but there is no failure,” sits behind the founding of Hyundai Auto Industrial in 1946, which they call the foundation of the Hyundai group. He chose Ford as an early partner, then, when Ford showed an ambition toward Korean technology, went on to develop a passenger car of his own. Until the Pony appeared in 1976, Hyundai was, in this telling, shaken to the point of survival, and had to resist American pressure to abandon a model of its own. He did not yield to persuasion or threat, the notes say, and the same temperament later made a move from construction into shipbuilding possible.

Jo Woong-rae, placed here as a mid-sized Korean case, began a telephone-information business with 20 million won, made a stir with the number 700-5425 and with jingle marketing, then acquired a soju firm and laid a 14.5-kilometre red-clay path on Gyejoksan. Oxygen soju and mixed soju, the notes write, opened a new market by a reverse of the usual idea, in a field already crowded. In Guri, the anonymized owner Lee ○○ of Choryechongjudan is said to have recorded 400 million won in annual sales, added a funeral-director’s licence and calligraphy to a hanbok craft, and offered the related services in one place. The shop, they add, would not sell a hanbok until the customer had tried on a design made for that person, and also taught how to wear and store it.

SoftBank, Dyson, and a small firm known for care

Abroad, Son Masayoshi is introduced as a self-made chief executive, a third-generation Korean in Japan, who left high school, crossed to the United States, and finished at Berkeley, as the notes name the university. After a year and a half of market research, convinced that personal computers would become ordinary, he founded SoftBank in 1981 at the age of twenty-four, and within four years, they write, held 60 percent of the market. In 2001 he went into high-speed internet, posted annual losses of more than 1 trillion won as the notes put the figure, worked some eighteen hours a day, and sold almost all of his assets, then turned a profit in four years. An early stake in Alibaba, they add, returned a 3,000-fold gain, and he had by then invested in some 1,300 young information-technology firms.

James Dyson is described as an inventor who studied design at the Royal College of Art in Britain, and as a chief executive who led research and development for forty-five years. In 2015 alone, the notes say, twenty-five new products appeared in a single year. Technology, in this telling, is what matters most to a firm’s survival; each year 30 percent of profit went to research and development, and the engineers numbered some 1,000. Terao Ken of Balmuda, called here a small overseas firm and sometimes “the Apple of small appliances,” is introduced as a chief executive who attends to customers’ pleasure with a creative spirit and with care. These research budgets and product counts stay in the notes’ window, and are not rewritten as later official totals.

What the six are said to share

All six, the notes conclude, showed an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to take a challenge, and scored highly on immersion in the work, on decisiveness, and on patience. When a goal they had set themselves was reached, they set a higher one and went on. A low appetite for rank and power, in this telling, made it easier to talk with staff and with customers; a wish to learn from failure, rather than to fear it, became a chance to grow. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ comparison of six chief executives, including Chung Ju-yung, Son Masayoshi, and James Dyson

Last updated: 14 November 2026