Honestly, I'm Not Interested in Your Passion

The author's writing style wasn't really the temperature I prefer. The impassioned typography wasn't my personal taste either. I think I had my own preconceptions about the "journalist" background.

The title was warm, the style and typography were cold, and the content was warm again — I feel like I was tossed back and forth dizzily. Among all that, I've jotted down a few passages on the blog that almost anyone could relate to.








There's a slogan called dongdo-seogi (東道西器), which Joseon raised around the 19th century when it was pursuing modernization while also trying to appease the wijeong-cheoksa (defend orthodoxy, reject heterodoxy) faction. The gist of this idea was to accept the advanced technology of the West while preserving the superior spiritual civilization of the East, seeking harmony between the two.
This kind of thinking (well, I'm not sure I'd personally call it an "ideology"...) wasn't unique to Joseon. China had its zhongti-xiyong, and Japan had its wakon-yōsai, which were all the same thing.

This same pattern can easily be found in most Korean companies today as well. Even if people admit that falling behind is unavoidable if you don't change, human nature being what it is, they still want to hold on to the familiar internal culture and the authority they've already grabbed. That's why you often see situations where the existing order is left untouched and only the latest trends are pasted on top of it.

It's probably not that different from some of the "senior figures" from well-known companies who analyze what they call "MZ trends" — trends that even the MZ generation itself doesn't actually know about — repackage them as shiny new content, and sell them with the nuance that "if you don't know this, you're falling behind."


But just as clashing worldviews rarely coexist for long without conflict, in the history of humanity, cases where people tried to selectively accept new civilization while preserving their existing values and vested interests rarely succeeded. In fact, dongdo-seogi, zhongti-xiyong, and wakon-yōsai all merely delayed the reforms that were bound to come, and in the end none of them managed to reconcile the preservation of traditional worldviews with building a rich nation and a strong army.

Moreover, just as academia evaluates dongdo-seogi as having ultimately retreated into the logic of "abandon the acceptance of Western technology and desperately defend only the preservation of the Eastern Way," in companies too, efforts to build new thinking on top of old mindsets almost always tilt toward preserving old habits. That is, they claim on the surface to harmoniously blend old and new and pursue gradual development, but in reality, most of the time, when new civilization threatens what already exists, they side with the legacy of the past.

When leaders are preoccupied with preserving the old, so-called "renewal" with only the name attached tends to fizzle out. Once the leaders who used "dongdo-seogi" as an excuse to push off change until after their own retirement finally leave, the inevitable wind of enlightenment arrives in full force, sweeping over the already-outpaced company and shaking it violently. Much like the Korean peninsula at the end of the Joseon dynasty.

Historically, too, the ones who survived and prospered in the end were mostly those who quickly accepted change and were willing to boldly abandon outdated customs. Leaders with no time left before they leave the company might be fine just coasting along "for as long as they're still there." But any leader who wishes for the organization to survive and prosper for a long time needs to set aside the temptation of "dongdo-seogi," boldly throw away what they currently enjoy, be prepared to completely transform, and willingly accept and adapt to the currents of a progressing era.

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In other words, the people who ruined the once-great Toshiba were not traitors who hated or deceived the organization. On the contrary, it was the people who took pride in the group they belonged to and faithfully followed their superiors' orders — it was they who ate away at the roots of the company.

Among the ideologies that emerged in the modern era there is something called "chauvinism." It's an extreme and intensely closed-off ideology that pushes blind loyalty and patriotism by asserting the superiority of one's country, and ostracizes as traitors or turncoats any members who don't comply or who voice opposing views.

This kind of ideology doesn't only manifest itself in state organizations. It's not very hard to find companies where a similar mindset runs rampant. They coerce employees into cultivating loyalty to the company and obeying orders from above, and any member who doesn't meekly follow is disadvantaged on the grounds of "lacking loyalty" or "failing to adapt." Companies where leaders themselves lead the charge in creating that atmosphere are also not rare. After all, there's hardly anything more easy to handle and more useful than a subordinate who has unconditional attachment to the workplace and obeys orders from above without complaint.

However, in a group without criticism, there is no way to stop a misjudgment, and members who pour all their strength into a project that got its direction wrong because of blind loyalty only end up wasting their competence and talent. If that continues, you often end up facing the strange sight of internal cohesion solidifying by the day while management deteriorates. That "everyone working together in perfect unison" situation, which so many managers long for, can, depending on the case, turn out to be a poison that drives the organization to the fatal point.

George Patton, the U.S. general who fought in World War II, left us these words: "The object of war is not to die for your country. But to make the other bastard die for his." The point is that being swayed by loyalty and blindly following the demands of those above you, carelessly throwing away your abilities and even your life, is in effect no different from helping the enemy.

That's why, in any group, leaders need to be wary of "blind loyalty and obedience." Even if, in the short term, it feels convenient and satisfying to have members follow even wrong judgments without question or criticism, in the long run it amounts to self-castrating the organization's ability to detect and avoid risks.








"Starting one beneficial thing is not as good as removing one harmful thing, and creating one new task is not as good as eliminating one existing task."

There are many differing views about the actual abilities and achievements of Yelü Chucai (耶律楚材), an official of the Mongol Empire, but this piece of advice he gave to Ögedei Khan is generally recognized as having gotten to the core of organizational management and operation. Of course, the evidence that Yelü Chucai really said this is rather thin, but even setting the speaker aside and looking at the statement itself, the consensus is that it's quite sensible.
So, as Yelü Chucai said, in terms of improving efficiency, removing one unnecessary task lingering in the organization can be far better than newly starting one excellent project.

In August of the same year, Shinhan Life also solicited employees through the intranet to suggest inefficient tasks or tasks that needed to be removed, and ended up receiving 169 proposals, of which it actively considered eliminating 150. A Shinhan Life official explained: "This is part of Work Delete and Work Diet, aimed at completely eliminating unnecessary tasks — so that even when executives or department heads change, past practices cannot be resurrected — in order to maximize efficiency."

This is something I think "the boss of the bosses," i.e., senior executives, should pay particular attention to. From the perspective of a "fighting" executive or middle manager who constantly stirs up trouble on flat ground claiming to "at least try something," such behavior might look admirable and touching, but in reality they could well be a liability that drains the organization's capacity and potential by creating "pretty garbage," and who should be cleared out as quickly as possible. From that angle, you might even interpret Yelü Chucai's maxim from an HR perspective as: "Promptly getting rid of one person wearing the wrong hat can be worth more than hiring one more sharp and capable talent."









I suspect it may already be happening in some corner of your company too. A leader hungry to be the "dancing whale" praised by the crowd, bursting the backs of innocent shrimp instead.
Even if there's something underhanded going on, some people figure that as long as the leader works with all that "fighting spirit," overall company productivity will rise, and they turn a blind eye even to middle managers' unjust exploitation, treating it as a form of "motivation." But that's really just a sucker's move — consuming the organization's long-term capacity just to pad an unethical leader's résumé. According to the Incruit survey I mentioned earlier, 67% of employees who experienced credit-stealing said they had considered quitting.

Suppose capable employees get sick of being repeatedly exploited and escape. Will the leader who has burned through their host like a parasite suddenly transform into a diligent worker? At best, they'll use the achievements they stole as a résumé to infiltrate their way into another place where new victims reside. By the time management figures out what's happening, not only are there no more shrimp left to offer their backs, even the whales that would have danced for them are gone.

By the time you're lamenting the empty fishery, it's too late. These situations have to be prevented in advance. You can't just leave excellent employees who actually produce real results to feel unfairness and alienation and be consumed by the urge to jump ship. Therefore, the top brass, no matter how beautiful the results a leader brings them, must always scrutinize the detailed process by which those results were produced. That splendid achievement making the leader look so good might just be a by-product of the private desires of a whale who, blinded by praise, crushed and sucked dry the backbones of sturdy shrimp.









"PlayPump" is another pretty famous case in a similar vein. It was a device actually built by attaching a merry-go-round that children could hang onto to a well pump, so that water would come out just by children riding on it and playing. The idea of simultaneously giving African children play and water drew considerable attention, causing such a worldwide sensation that the World Bank awarded it a "Development Marketplace Award" and the Clinton Foundation provided $16 million in funding. But now, more than 20 years later, not a single PlayPump is still in active service. The problem here too ultimately came down to "needs." The hand pumps African residents had been using took about 28 seconds to pump up 20 liters of water. By contrast, it took the PlayPump around 3 minutes and 7 seconds to raise the same amount of water. To supply 15 liters of water each to 2,500 residents with a PlayPump, you'd have to run it continuously, without rest, for a whopping 27 hours. That was already far beyond any level at which the fun of playing could offset the drudgery. And honestly, regardless of nationality, kids get bored of whatever they're playing with in a matter of seconds, so the very expectation that they'd faithfully spin the PlayPump for years on end was a huge miscalculation from the start. In the end, of the roughly 2,000 PlayPumps installed throughout southern Africa, most have reportedly now been reduced to eyesores or dismantled at residents' request.

Of course, there are markets where it's still possible to compete on storytelling alone, but in reality, in most cases, you can't expect to be evaluated solely on "the message" while setting product quality aside. No matter how moving the story behind the launch of the project may be, no matter how hard it may be to even estimate the scale of effort that went into bringing the product into the world, or even if it was made based on ideals so noble they'd draw the admiration of the entire earth — if consumers don't pay attention, it ends up being forgotten, meaningless.

Customers who pass on their products aren't necessarily deliberately ignoring the makers' effort, intention, or passion. On the contrary, there are plenty of consumers who, once they're somewhat satisfied with the quality, are ready to listen to the ideology or appeal the producer is shouting about. It's just that in the world of grown-ups, in the world of pros, it's not easy to win recognition by waving only the background and the message without an inner core that actually meets the customer's needs.

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In fact, as you can see from cases like Tian Feng (전풍) and Zhang He (장합), more dangerous to your well-being than being crushed by someone who made the wrong proposal while you spoke the right truth is the later moment when your view turns out to have been right after all.

Your superiors' schemes, which they pushed through while belittling you to your face, are exposed as nothing but armchair fantasies; and the strategy you tearfully retracted after being unable to withstand the waves of ridicule and condemnation turns out, in retrospect, to have been a farsighted insight that saw through the future. Suppose then that the executives or top brass, repenting for the past mistake of plugging their ears, decide to place you in a key position.

Positions are limited in any organization. And high positions in particular rarely sit vacant for long. That means if you're going to put a new talent in a prized seat, you have to remove someone who's already sitting in a senior position. In that kind of situation, the ones in the most precarious spot would be the ones who insisted on wrong claims, forcibly suppressed the rightful views, and caused losses to the company — and their followers.

Right or wrong, they too are the protagonists of their own lives, with precious lives and families of their own. What they're carrying is too heavy for them to gracefully admit their mistakes and step back. Just as Feng Ji and Guo Tu (봉기, 곽도) did, those who pushed through misjudgments will slander your character and loyalty in order to cover up the mistakes they themselves made. Just as love is forgotten by another love, faults too tend to be forgotten by other faults. If you end up being labeled a troublemaker harboring rebellious intent, do you think that "slightly off-target proposal" your superiors just made will look like a big deal to the organization?

From your point of view it might look like a ridiculous resistance, but struggles for survival usually come with a fierceness you can't ignore. Even in run-of-the-mill classic novels, it's not rare to see scheming factions' last-ditch struggles swept away with a single authoritative order, is it? By the ending, misunderstandings and conflicts may all be resolved, but at least in the early-to-mid sections, it's more typical for the protagonist to be unjustly dismissed or exiled after being swept up in the slander of crafty officials clinging to their vested interests. Reality isn't much different. In fact, unlike classic novels, you can hardly even expect the hopeful ending where "by the time he reaches China, all things are resolved according to principle and justice prevails."


Of course, there are exceptions — like civil servants or public institution employees, whose identity makes it difficult to change jobs or careers, or entry-level staff at very stable large corporations where changing companies too often can actually poison your career. But in any case, when there are clear signs that the organization is heading in a completely wrong direction — especially if you've publicly raised an objection and been rebuked by those above — rather than quietly sit back and watch whose word turns out to be right, it's worth considering a strategy of pulling yourself out early.

It's a truth anyone will eventually realize, if they live long enough. A person's sincere self-reflection is not an event you can easily expect. What's more, from the superior's point of view, it's almost always far more beneficial for their situation to scapegoat someone else to smooth over their mistakes than to meekly acknowledge their faults and step down. Just as The New York Times put it some 150 years ago: "After an unfortunate event has passed, society desperately demands a scapegoat. It seeks comfort by finding someone on whom to pile the sins of all and send them into the wilderness."










In terms of stable career growth and management too, rather than hastily throwing yourself into a field you can't be sure will rise or sink and betting your fate on a "gamble," it's far more efficient to quickly jump on a domain whose position is becoming firm, get a look at it just "half a beat" faster than others, and then act the expert. Honestly, at the level of a regular employee rather than a researcher, there are plenty of industry issues where it's still not too late even if you only touch them or jump in around the time they become a hot topic.

In reality, setting aside researchers and scholars with master's or doctoral degrees, how many practitioners do you think would have mastered or studied things like "Agile" or "Digital Transformation" before they became trendy? And yet, you can very commonly see people who took the "quick-study" route gain fame or get treated better than the "real experts" through aggressive marketing and self-promotion.

Of course, if you view this through the lens of conscience or morality, there may be some unpleasantness about it, but for someone trying to survive in a jungle-like society, picking their tools purely by preference is, in a way, a ridiculous luxury. There are times in life when, even if you don't feel like it, certain strategies or means have to be factored into your consideration in order to survive.










Epilogue

Leadership, now, is "Diplomacy"

"War is not the action of a living force on a lifeless mass, and, since total non-resistance could never be war, it is always the mutual collision of two living forces."

Carl von Clausewitz said this in his book On War. Confronting another human being is clearly different from dealing with an inanimate object, and in the process of carrying through one's will, one must necessarily factor in the other party's reaction or resistance.  

That's why today's leadership and organizational management strategies need to move closer to "diplomacy." Taking the attitude of a mother country dealing with a colony is bound to land you in trouble. Task assignments and opinion-gathering alike must be negotiations that presuppose compromise and discussion. You must not make the mistake Russia did — believing that the gap in sheer force alone determines superiority in a head-on clash, without carefully taking into account Ukraine's resistance or even the world's combined counterattack. Your words and actions must all employ diplomatic rhetoric, maintaining a clear mirror undisturbed by emotions.