1. Prologue
A marketing team — whether or not it's formally part of their job —
must always be aware of domestic and international best practices, trends, and consumer psychology.
Because, based on those external and internal market conditions, it is their job to improve their own product (business model) and raise customer satisfaction.
But there is something even more important than the work or the attitude described above:
the ability to run internal marketing (organizational culture).
When we're not building something ourselves but benchmarking foreign cases, we have to obtain agreement — about its validity and its acceptance — from people inside who don't know the situation.
No matter how marketable and validated an item is, it's useless without internal agreement. Improving the product is tied to innovation, and innovation, before efficiency or productivity, cannot be separated from organizational culture.
2. Introduction
Organizational culture is formed around some external "common sense" that each individual carries — not the judgment they hold inwardly, but the judgment they express outwardly. Based on each person's external common sense, the organization's common sense gets built. Employees then get evaluated on those standards. So how is this individual external common sense — the thing at the bottom of the organization's culture — actually formed?
Every individual in an organization is an entire universe shaped by their own life story. So it's impossible to grasp any one person's full set of values. Fortunately, though, people behave differently depending on their social position and situation. In other words, they play a role suitable to their seat.
So during organizational life, people don't act and judge purely from their internal common sense. They compare their existing common sense with what the position and role demand, and act on that basis.
The word "common sense" is most often used in the process of evaluating others.
In qualitative judgments, people frequently reach for the word "common sense" as the reason — a word everyone takes for granted and one that lets them justify their own behavior.
The judgment that shows outwardly, the judgment rooted in "common sense," flows from top to bottom.
Judgments like "Why are you like that? So rude. How could someone be that way?" are transmitted through various filters of softening before they reach the other person.
(Of course, they're sometimes delivered directly, but they're usually delivered in all sorts of forms — starting with "you shouldn't do that" and moving to glares, invisible cold-shouldering, and so on.)
3. Main Argument (1)
What I think of as "rudeness" (that is, what I think of as common sense) —
it isn't "not talking back to your superior or not contradicting them."
It's:
To protect your standing in front of the other person,
knowing something and pretending you don't,
and rationalizing that choice as "maturity" — telling yourself it was an unavoidable choice in an unavoidable situation.
Having an external common sense that differs from your internal common sense is self-deception.
The important point to make clear here is not that I'm criticizing self-deception itself.
I want to point out that people, in rationalizing their own self-deception, end up reducing someone else's courageous, internally-consistent action to something to be criticized.
They usually say things like: "Do you think I don't know? This is just a choice for the organization. Or: "My behavior isn't for me, it's for my family." — telling themselves they've made a difficult, mature choice, though they know better.
And that, on a small scale, is how overtime cultures and forced company dinners are made… and on a larger scale, how waste gets dumped into rivers and seas, how ships sink, how nuclear plants leak, how political slush funds and corruption get built.
3. Main Argument (2)
So how are those "mature-looking" situations and choices produced?
Running an organization is very lonely.
Often the eyes on you from inside feel colder and heavier than the eyes from outside. And so the motivation to achieve gets transferred around.
The result: CEOs who look like generals emerge. They set up external meetings, take the meetings themselves, and decisions get made from the CEO's chair rather than the team leader's.
And the same thing happens to staff.
An organization that falls into this ends up in a "situation where everyone pretends to read each other's minds."
Subordinates nod along with whatever their superiors say in order to get a nod back. Or rather, they pretend to agree. Or rather, they have no choice but to agree.
Because they have families. Because they're supposed to be "adults." Or at least, they've reached what society calls adult age.
The more a company is like this (a general-like CEO leading the charge, "mature" employees), the quicker staff stop showing up to work the day after payroll is missed.
Because the company is regarded as an organization that, by social common sense, is premised on paying wages.
Because the situation ends up being the CEO's responsibility.
Because "what can a mere employee be responsible for?" has become common sense.
In the end, no one thinks of this situation as a result of their own attitude. And anyone who did think that way has already been pressured out by the employees and employers who don't think that way.
So even when the CEO is wounded, they have to hide the wound. They can't show it. Because they've created a place where it's "common sense" to quit the moment wages are late. Common sense and culture are built by the organization. And that organization is chosen and built by the CEO.
3. Main Argument (3)
Reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you meet all sorts of heroes.
Beyond Cao Cao or Sima Yi, who unified the three kingdoms, there are countless other heroes. Yes, they were heroes. And they were exceptional.
Some were born in the wrong age; some failed because of their lord or their retainers. But how can anyone dismiss these heroes just because they didn't manage the unification?
Working in society, you meet all kinds of CEOs.
Listening to them, despite their varied circumstances, they all have success stories behind them.
Because they haven't gone public, or because they run things as sole proprietors — they are always in the present tense, so I actually think they're better off than the generals and lords of old classics.
Still, there is one thing I want to leave behind (at least, as far as I know):
the only lord who personally charged around the battlefield was Lu Bu.
The only lord who was Lu Bu — the only one who made unavoidable choices in unavoidable situations.
I want to be clear that this is not to call Lu Bu foolish or lacking. I simply find it painful. Despite his capability and sincerity. Despite the wife and family he loved and cherished so much — he met such a sorrowful end.
Even without personally grabbing the enemy general by the neck at the head of the army, a lord is entitled to be recognized as a lord simply by bearing the name of lord.
Because if they can't, people will just leave. If someone is still standing beside you, know that you are already being sufficiently recognized.
Revealing your own weaknesses and limits is not shameful.
Please know that hiding your wounds and shouldering all the risk is not maturity.
4. Conclusion
At this point, I think the conclusion is up to each reader.
5. Epilogue
Do you know how to play Korean chess (janggi)?
The general (jang/gung) never leaves the nine points of the palace. And it never moves more than one step.
That isn't a weakness — it buys the time for realizing other, more important things, and creates the conditions to devote oneself to them.
Are you one of the great pieces — the chariot, the cannon, the horse, the elephant — or are you the gung (general), the one everyone shouts "Jang!" toward?
