Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (8 page)

My global PR team was trying to introduce the company to the world’s motoring media—if not getting them to pronounce our name right—by conducting nothing short of a massive, ongoing journalist airlift. We brought scores of journalists each year to Korea, scooping them up from all around the world and having them delivered to us.

The Hyundai subsidiaries around the world would identify several top motoring journalists in their country and we’d fly them to Korea for a three- or four-day program to learn about Hyundai—actually see its facilities up-close and appreciate its scale, understand that it was a top global automaker—and to learn about Korean culture. In addition to selecting the most widely read and influential journalists, we’d pick jurors for that country’s Car of the Year awards, which every automaker covets.

This kind of program is standard procedure in the auto industry, and motoring journalists routinely accept these trips, which
almost always include business-class flights and top-end hotels. The former
Washington Post
journalist in me instantly recoiled against this idea. But that lasted only about five minutes. As a PR man, I came to understand that these get-to-know-you trips are a powerful tool for getting your message out. And, to be fair, motoring journalists are literally traveling to auto company events all around the world every week and could not do so if their magazines were forced to pay the bills.

Throughout the remainder of 2010, all of 2011, and well into 2012, we had journalist visits almost every week, save for the summer and year-end holiday times. Our throughput was impressive and looked that way in the results we reported to management. One week it’d be a group of journalists from Spain. The next week, Germany. The week after, Thailand; then Malaysia, the U.K., the Czech Republic, Turkey, and so on. Eventually, we’d cycle back through a country to hit a second round of journalists. There was nothing secret about these trips; the journalists wrote about them in great detail and in many languages.

These three- and four-day visits typically started at the journalists’ hotel in Seoul at seven thirty or eight a.m., when we’d load them onto a big Hyundai tour bus and haul them to headquarters for presentations and on-the-record interviews with the key executives in charge of their country’s sales, marketing, and product development. This impressed the journalists, who were able to ask questions about upcoming models, sales targets, and marketing plans directly to the executives in charge of them—unlike many other automakers, which gave the journalists access only to PR flacks like me.

On other days during their visit, we’d load the journalists back onto the bus for a full-day trip to Hyundai’s nearest factory, its steel plant, or its R & D facility.

Hyundai’s R & D complex is about ninety minutes south of
Seoul, in a rural district called Namyang. Everyone calls it the Namyang R&D center, or just “Namyang.” Its very existence is remarkable and a testament to the will of the company. Former R & D vice chairman H. S. Lee was assigned the task of building the R & D center in Namyang and related the improbable story of its creation to some visiting German journalists over dinner one night in Seoul. The pharaoh Cheops himself would have been proud of the feat.

Hyundai owned a big chunk of land in Namyang, and then-chairman Chung Ju-yung, Hyundai’s founder, ordered Lee to erect the R & D center there. Like all major automakers’ R & D centers, Hyundai’s would need several test tracks with multiple road surfaces, a high-speed oval track, large indoor facilities for crash tests, a design center, a pilot plant—basically, a miniature assembly line factory where prototypes are built—and, of course, security to make sure the competitors don’t snoop.

But when Lee drilled down into the ground at Namyang, he hit water. It wasn’t a marsh, but it wasn’t far off. “But this,” Lee said, “is where the chairman said ‘Build it.’ ” So Lee did. Over the next several months, thousands of dump trucks carrying dirt drove into the site. They dumped their loads, and bulldozers spread it out and built it up. Eventually, Lee erected a ten-foot-high, multi-acre, flat-topped pyramid. Then he let it settle. After Lee had his building site, he needed security. He knew that Hyundai was clearing trees at another site for a different project. Instead of allowing those trees to go to pulp, Lee ordered some 10,000 of them dug up and replanted around Namyang in what was basically a reforestation project. This is the Hyundai way of doing things.

With its own steel plant, parts suppliers, factories, and distribution system, Hyundai is largely a vertically integrated company, as it is called in business. This is not a new notion. More than one hundred years ago, Henry Ford had this idea. He owned mines
in Michigan and Minnesota that sent iron ore to his River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. There, a mill turned the iron ore into steel that became the chassis, fenders, and parts of the Ford vehicles that rolled off the Rouge assembly line and were shipped to Ford-owned dealers around the country. Ford controlled the entire automaking process, from the ore in the ground to the car lots themselves. Because business trends change as routinely and often nonsensically as fashion, vertical integration became obsolete in late-twentieth-century manufacturing philosophy. It was replaced by outsourcing, with manufacturers buying steel from steelmakers, parts from suppliers, and so on and divesting themselves of any business no longer considered core.

Even though Hyundai does buy some parts from non-Hyundai suppliers, it either has not gone through, or will never go through, the transition to full outsourcing. Neither vertical integration nor outsourcing is the empirically superior method. What’s superior is which method works for you. For Hyundai, working in a homogenous society with a top-down command-and-control system, vertical integration is efficient, accountable, and the best way, Hyundai believes, to ensure automobile quality from molten iron to finished product in the showroom. And, as the company chairman, you can get your company and its vertically integrated affiliates to turn on a dime if need be, a luxury not enjoyed by manufacturers dependent upon a sprawling network of outsourced firms, each with their own interest at heart. And, in point of fact, some of the world’s biggest companies, such as Apple, place such pressure on their suppliers through sheer market share and tough negotiation that, in essence, they can act like vertically integrated companies. When Steve Jobs decided, only weeks before the release of the first iPhone, to redesign its touch screen, the Chinese manufacturer woke up thousands of workers in the middle of the night, fed them, and put them on
assembly lines the moment the first new screens arrived from the U.S.

Indeed, though Korean companies are famous for their ’round-the-clock work hours and employer demands, they do not differ that much from Apple and some other Silicon Valley tech companies. Both Apple and Hyundai have been led by charismatic figures who get the final say. Both companies ask high performance and long hours from their employees. Both create an inward culture where employees stay for a long time and don’t routinely mix with peers at rival companies. And both Apple and Hyundai are successful.

From a PR perspective, these journalist visits allowed us to tell a compelling company narrative of carmaking. In a single day, we could start reporters at Hyundai’s steel plant, where they would watch huge slabs of glowing orange molten steel being stretched, cooled, and wound into twenty-two-ton coils, each one almost twice as tall as a man and more than a kilometer long when stretched out. Then we’d drive them to a nearby Hyundai assembly line factory, where they’d watch those same steel coils unspooled and fed into great stamping machines of unfathomable pneumatic power. At the other end of the factory, brand-new Sonatas would roll off the line, built with those coils of Hyundai steel and Hyundai parts. No other automaker could put on a show like this. We took plenty of pictures of the visiting journalists to give to them as mementos and to include in the reports to our bosses. In Korea, instead of “cheese,” you instruct photo subjects to “say ‘kimchi!’”

As exciting as it was to see all this, for the first few months these tours were the toughest part of my job. I was confined with a busload of journalists who asked a lot of questions about Hyundai. And I was expected to have answers and sound confident. I was barely keeping my head above water.

Hyundai Motor Group was a vast conglomerate with 80,000 employees all over the world, two car brands, multiple affiliate companies, a rich and complicated history often foreign to outsiders, multiple factories and models, a brand philosophy that needed explaining and, because it was so young and new to self-promotion, Hyundai was probably the most unknown of all global auto brands. I didn’t speak for Kia, but I had to provide a sensible explanation of the difference between Hyundai and Kia. I didn’t work for the shipbuilders Hyundai Heavy Industries, but I had to be able to explain the difference between that company and Hyundai Motor. I wasn’t born in Korea, but I had to be able to provide a CliffsNotes version of the country’s history and Confucianism. These were things baked into the DNA of Hyundai employees and Koreans. But I had to learn them, and fast, cramming my head full of facts whenever I was back at my desk or home on my computer.

It was only my journalism experience that prevented me from looking (too) foolish and embarrassing my new company. Journalists pride themselves on becoming “instant experts” on almost any topic. It’s sort of a joke, because we know we’re not, but it’s also not a joke. Mostly, we are quick studies who can gain a passable knowledge of a new topic pretty quickly and write about it with authority, because that’s what we’re trained to do. I don’t know how many mornings I walked into work at the
Post
, got assigned a story on a topic I’d never even heard of, and, by the end of the day, had produced a
Post
-worthy story.

This is how a lot of journalism gets done.

After having somehow formed an answer to a question from a journalist on one of the bus trips early in my time at Hyundai, he asked, “How long have you worked here?”

Sheepishly, I answered, “Um, two weeks.”

“Two weeks!” he repeated. “It sounds like two years!”

And this is how a lot of PR gets done.

These long days with journalists from all over the world allowed me to hone my PR skills in another way: deftly moving on when one of them would say something shockingly racist. It happens more often than you might think. One eye-opening thing about living overseas was the casual, conversation-level bigotry and racism I so frequently encountered. I’d be talking to a journalist from, say, a country in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or practically anywhere. This may have been an educated man, possibly schooled in England or the U.S. I’d been enjoying the conversation, learning about his country, sharing a few laughs, and then, out of nowhere, he’d drop a caustic anti-Semitic remark. Or a hateful characterization of another tribe that lived in his country. And, for some reason, he just assumed that I agreed. It would have been, strictly speaking, bad PR to have called him a racist jerk or punched him in the nose. So I learned how to move on. I felt bad letting it slide, but realized it was part of my job. Indeed, my exposure to global journalists educated me on numerous cross-border and inter-ethnic hatreds I’d had no idea existed. When I’d mention this to my Korean colleagues later, some would invariably respond: Americans are so hypocritical. You think the same things, but you just don’t say them. My response to that was: That may be true, but there is a value in not saying a toxic thing, even if you may believe it. Saying it gives others license to say it, too, perpetuating the evil.

At the end of a day’s tour with the journalists, we’d usually go directly to a dinner, always hosted by a senior Hyundai executive. The dinners were often held in the Gangnam district. The sidewalks were full of arm-in-arm salarymen staggering from round two to round three and packs of music fans hoping to catch a glimpse of their K-pop heroes at restaurants and clubs.

Some nights we’d take the foreign journalists to a Western
restaurant to boast of how international Seoul was. Other nights we’d take them to an upscale Korean restaurant, with seemingly limitless courses of food; sometimes we’d sit on chairs, other times on the floor. For VIP journalists, we’d often offer after-dinner entertainment. Typically, this was a trio of Korean musicians dressed in
hanbok
, or the traditional attire. For women, a
hanbok
looks something like a brightly colored silk, empire-waist dress. For men, it is a tunic with billowy sleeves, loose pants or tights, and a broad-brimmed hat. The musicians plucked at ancient Korean string instruments and kept time on a small drum. In a wonderfully intentioned attempt to make foreign visitors feel at home in Korea, these musicians would often break into instrumental versions of Beatles and ABBA songs. Unfortunately, the incongruous mix of culture, instrument, and tune often caused the journalists to laugh and comment on how bizarre Korea was. After a while I recommended that the traditional Korean musicians play traditional tunes, which we explained in programs given to the journalists. The journalists wanted to feel like they were in someplace foreign and authentic, and this worked out better.

Despite its electric feel, Gangnam at night meant, for me, the end of a day that began six a.m. and would not end until I pulled into my driveway nine thirty or ten p.m. This was not terribly helpful to a young marriage. Rebekah, keeping U.S. government hours at the embassy, would be home by five thirty p.m. and would have read, cooked, and bonded with Apple TV, watching
Friday Night Lights
and
Bones
. Several nights a week she lived a life more appropriate to a single professional woman, which is not what she signed up for when she got married. Often she was asleep when I dragged myself in, bleary-eyed, tie askew, smelling of Korean barbecue. Her forbearance was remarkable.

I felt pulled between my home life and my work obligations. There were dinners each night during the week for each group of
visiting journalists, which meant I could stay out until ten p.m. three nights a week if I wanted. I had to figure out which dinners were absolutely critical I attend—typically the ones my bosses attended—and which ones my team leader could handle. On the one hand, if I went to all the dinners, it created tension at home. If I begged out on too many dinners, it created tension with my team.