Another post about Korea

And I even had a Shin bowl for lunch.


Stopped by Shnucks this morning on the way to school to pick up some donuts and honey. The donuts were for breakfast, to get me through the last round of student movies. The honey was for my throat, which has gotten slightly worse over the last few days. Hope I'm not getting sick. I'm sure averaging five hours of sleep a night isn't at all related. I've actually made myself get 8 hours these last few days just to try to stay healthy, as nothing kills productivity like illness.


Speaking of productivity, I went to a lecture tonight that was almost entirely Koreans and almost entirely management students. The speaker, who was also Korean, looked at us and joked, 'you all could be my children.' The lecture was at the architecture school and the information was passed around because it might have some interest for architecture:

Mr Moon Kook-Hyun has recently lead the UNCCD (UN Convention to Combat Desertification) and he will be giving a lecture at WashU this coming Tuesday, the 15th, in Steinberg at 7:30pm. The title of the lecture is "Korea: New Challenges and New Leaders" but he will be addressing issues in environment, social responsibilities of corporations, and global competitiveness.

I think I might have been the only architecture student there. I was mostly interested in the environmental aspects and how one approaches it from a business perspective. The guy is, after all, a CEO.


Actually, most of the presentation was about business and management technique, how he was able to attempt to meet the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability, and wildly succeed doing it.


It was interesting to listen to non-architecture lectures because we do, actually, have to interface with the real world of business once we get out of here. Moon talked about the importance of speed- how quickly can innovations be vetted and brought to market, and he began to tie this economic narrative with another narrative- about quality, trust, distributed empowerment, and morality. For example, if you want speed, you need parts from your suppliers quickly and the fastest way to get it is for them to send it to you as you need it, or just-in-time logistics. But it requires a level of trust between the supplier and the company, as there isn't time to inventory or run checks on whatever it is.


Another interesting point he made was that if you ever need to fire 20% of your company, it's far better to simply cut everyone's hours back 20%. And he's also all about education, and developing innovation in everyone in the company, etc.


I did learn that I know almost nothing about business budgeting. Moon polled the audience as to what they thought Samsung spent on its employees. I ventured first: 70%? The rest of the crowd was too polite to laugh. I was partly confusing the value of productivity of the employee, and partly thinking about about how much money must be spent on salaries and wages and benefits. Turns out the answer is 15%. That's it. The car division is even lower, closer to 5%. Medical workers tend to get a higher percentage, like 25%. I still don't really understand how that works.


If I was running a bakery, for example, and I'm paying Enzo the baker my employee $10 an hour, this means that every hour I'm spending about $67 total, or $57 which I'm not spending on Enzo. That's seems kind of high for an hourly cost of raw materials, energy, rent, advertising, logistics.