Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan Read Online Free PDF

country. That was my midlife crisis.
    The big question was: How would Hyundai, Korea, or I know if we had made it through our midlife crises? How would we know if we had succeeded in writing a second act? With businesses and governments, you can establish quantifiable measurements, or KPIs—key performance indicators, as they’re called. Former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak campaigned on a catchy “747” platform: he wanted to achieve 7 percent GDP growth, reach a $40,000 per capita income, and make Korea the world’s seventh-largest economy. Hyundai worked to achieve a top-three quality ranking among its global competitors. But would Korea have to look beyond GDP growth and employment? Would Hyundai’s midlife transition require new metrics? Whatabout me? How would I know— when would I know—if I’d done it? What were my KPIs?
    It was my great good fortune to have arrived at Hyundai at the moment it was launching its grand experiment and just as Korea began trying to reimagine itself. My global PR team would be instrumental in Hyundai’s next big step, and I had a press box seat for the beginning of Korea’s attempted transformation. The number of foreign executives who had worked at the big Korean chaebol —ever—could be counted on two hands. This was history being made, and I had insider access that almost no other waygookin could or would have.
    HYUNDAI’S MAKEOVER
    When I joined Hyundai, the company was a couple of years into a strong run of growing sales and increasing reputation around the globe, especially in the U.S. The world’s biggest automakers—Chevrolet, Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan, Honda—saw Hyundai as you might see a car coming up fast in your rearview mirror.
    Starting in 2008, Hyundai began an aggressive overseas capacity expansion. It raised new automotive manufacturing plants in the Czech Republic, India, and China and had blueprints for new plants that would open in the next few years in Russia and Brazil. In 2008, Hyundai sold 2.8 million cars globally. By the end of 2013, it was 4.7 million. Combined with its sister company, Kia, Hyundai had become the world’s fifth-largest automaker, trailing only GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and—barely—Ford. Even without Kia, Hyundai’s global market share was 5 percent, the same as Fiat Chrysler’s and bigger than Honda’s. In the U.S., Hyundai sold nearly 540,000 cars in 2010—more than Dodge.
    To me, as with most Americans who hadn’t paid close attention to the Korean auto industry during the 2000s, Hyundaistill had the air of a joke about it. It entered the U.S. market in 1985 with the low-priced Excel and followed with other inexpensive models and chirpy advertising. They were seen as a cheaper, pluckier alternative to Japanese cars, already well established in the States.
    But as the eighties turned into the nineties, the first Hyundai cars aged poorly. Subsequent generations of offerings to the U.S. market were badly turned out, with low quality and rust problems. The nadir came in 1998 when Hyundai sold only a little more than 90,000 cars in the U.S. Hyundai became to the nineties what Yugo had been to the eighties: a punch line.
    So it’s no surprise that most Americans missed Hyundai’s radical management philosophy shift in 1999. Switching from a manufacture-and-export model, Hyundai established an aggressive and sprawling quality management regime, appointed a vice chairman of quality, ramped up R & D efforts, benchmarked the best Japanese competitors, and set seemingly unrealistic goals. As former Hyundai Motor America CEO John Krafcik used to say: “We keep setting targets we don’t know how we can meet.” Even better, Hyundai’s head of R & D once told reporters: “We make 7 million cars a year and we have to have the same quality as BMW, which makes only 2 million.” Mass production is the killer of quality: the more cars you make, the greater the chance of quality problems. Yet Hyundai demanded elite, European