Corporate Culture in South Korea

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Corporate culture in South Korea | Loosening Their Ties; A punishing work culture is gradually being relaxed. Economist, Nov 28, 2015.
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... oosening-their-ties
("Employee loyalty and centralised decision-making served the chaebol well from the 1960s on, as they led the South’s rapid industrialisation after a devastating war that cemented the Korean peninsula’s division. Military discipline seeped into businesses. * * * Yet [Korean] companies are realising that their continued success, at home and abroad, requires an overhaul of the working culture that made them so big in the first place")

Note:
(a) "Since 2012 'Pride,' a handbook, has set a new tone for the internal culture of Hyundai Capital. "

Hyundai Capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Capital
(full name: Hyundai Capital Services; doing consumer finance; is a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Company and GE Capital)
(b) "Established during Japanese rule of the peninsula (1910-45), most of the chaebol were fashioned in the working style of Japan’s pre-war zaibatsu, huge industrial companies; many chaebol founders were also educated in Japan, and their successors still have connections there. Lifetime employment, hierarchical management and pay based on seniority rather than performance all struck a chord with Korean Confucianist traditions."

Both chaebol and zai-batsu shares the same Chinese characters: 財閥 (English: conglomerate).

(c) "In 2006 SK, a telecoms company, ditched its elaborate hierarchy of job titles and started calling most staff just 'manager.' "
(i) SK Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Group
(in 1953 acquired Sunkyong 鮮京 Textiles and its name; in 1997 shortened the name to SK; based in Seoul)
(ii) my translation of ja.wikipedia.org about its origin:

The 1939 [while Korea was under Japan's colonial rule] saw the merger of 鮮満綢緞 (which had been established with Japanese capital in Korea) and 京都織物 (a Japanese company) and creation of 鮮京織物. In 1953 in the last leg of Korean War, CHEY John-hyun 崔 鍾建 [the founder of the SK Group], then a department head of the company was given the entire equipment of the company [by whom, Wikipedia does not say].

(d) "In 2013 KEPCO [Korea Electric Power Corporation], a state-run utility, declared it was discarding 14 'authoritarian remnants' among its working practices (chosen after an open consultation). All employees must now make their own coffee; forced after-hours drinking is banned; and the 'managers only' lift [British English for 'elevator'] has gone.”

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(e) "In 2007 it [LG Electronics, Inc -- a subsidiary of LG Corp] appointed Yong NAM 南 鏞 [according to ja.wikipedia.org], a reformer, as its chief executive. Mr Nam hired non-Koreans for senior positions and made English the company’s working language. According to Eric Surdej, the first non-Korean to join its upper management * * * Mr Surdej wrote a book about his experiences at LG, 'Ils sont fous ces Coréens' ('These Koreans are Crazy'), describing 14-hour working days, the 'quasi-religious' obeisance to bosses, and South Korean colleagues anxious to answer the phone on its first ring to impress their chiefs. Another obsession of the companies’ bosses is keeping up with, or preferably getting ahead of, their old colonial masters [Japanese]. Mr Surdej says his South Korean colleagues suspected that their Japanese counterparts had ‘opened themselves so much to the West that they had forgotten their own DNA’—and blamed this for corporate Japan’s slow decline."
(i) The book (so far in French only):

Ils sont fous ces coreens !  Dix ans chez les forcenés de l'efficacité.

literal translation: They are crazy, these Koreans!  Ten years at the business of maniacs of the efficiency  
(ii) French English dictionary:
* ils (pronoun): "they"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ils
* sont (v; third-person plural present indicative of être to be)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sont
* fou (adjective masculine singular; masculine plural fous): "mad, crazy"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fou
* ces (masculine and feminine plural of ce this, that): "these, those"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ces
  ^ The c’est is contraction of ce ‎it, this and est ‎is, so “c’est moy” means “it’s me.”
* dix (numeral; from Latin decem): "ten"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dix
* an (noun masculine; plural ans; from Latin annus): "year"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/an
* chez (preposition): "at the office or place of business of  <chez le dentiste at the dentist>"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chez
* forcené (noun masculine; plural forcenés): “maniac"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forcené
* efficacité (noun feminine): "efficacy"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/efficacité

(iii) Lee Sun-young, Korean Office Laid Bare; Frenchman recounts 10 yrs working at LG in memoir. Korea Herald, Aug 6, 2015
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150806000977
(book review on Surdej's book)

That’s a photo of Eric Surdej, who is 59.

(f)
(i) “Yongsun PAIK 裴 龍宣 [a professor at Los Angeles-based Loyola Marymount University], an expert on Korean management culture based in America. Now that many firms have stopped paying people according to time served [in what Taiwanese call (工作)年資], those who switch employers to escape an oppressive workplace or to try out something new are no longer penalised. As a result, South Koreans are now much more likely to move jobs than their Japanese peers.”
(ii) “ ‘Misaeng,’ a recent South Korean television drama, follows the trials and triumphs of a [fictional] young employee without a university degree as he climbs the corporate ladder of a typical conglomerate.”

Mi-saeng (TV series)  未生
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misaeng_(TV_series)
(2014; The title translates to "an incomplete life" (literally "not yet alive")

(g) “In 2018 South Korea’s working-age population will begin to decline. Its firms will increasingly have to compete for workers, and thus need to rethink their biases against women, foreigners and those with an unconventional education. The country’s traditional work culture helped power it to prosperity. Now it must change to attract the talent it needs.”