South Korea doesn't have the privileges that Canada and Finland both have of friendly adjacent neighbors and natural resources, which provide opportunities when Nortel and Nokia respectively stopped succeeding in the marketplace.
That being said, there have been terrible knock-on effects from this societal policy. Brutal work culture, low birth rates and much more.
As a Finn I laughed out loud.
It does not help that they are naturally fatalists so its always all or nothing scenario.
And there is a long border with Russia, one of the worst neighbours any country could have.
The border between Finland and Russia is 1,340 kilometers (832 miles). The border between South Korea and North Korea about 250 kilometers (155 miles). Also 5.5M people vs 55M people.
This is reflected in the structure of their armed forces. Per capita, they have the largest army in Nato if they mobilize.
I would say Chinese society values the family… people don’t really give a shit about others outside of family or friends.
My feeling on Japan is that they value their society and country much higher.
But I’m neither Chinese nor Japanese so take that with a grain of salt.
I would estimate that Japanese differ from Chinese to a similar degree that Russians differ from Spaniards.
I was thinking that despite I prefer iPhones, their SSDs were pretty good. I guess getting some of their 980s and 990s recently was a good investment for my (personal) IT budget. If they push people like this, I bet their products will become worse, not better.
I've adopted a more deliberate, focused work day and already seeing some improvements in my work quality, energy, and creativity.
Managers... well... sitting and talking in meetings, that you can do call day. So yeah, plan some extra meetings in the weekend, no problem.
If that will help things will be another question.
Maybe we’ll soon see Samsung executives post pictures of how they’re sleeping under their office desks on a Saturday night, like happened at Twitter.
The manager who posted those pictures was laid off from Twitter anyway a few months later. Performative crisis mode probably isn’t very useful to anyone.
Maybe it will appease the gods of the stock market for a while.
If my company would be in crisis, I would take the upper management into a quiet retreat, and then have a few meetings where we think creatively how we're going to deal with the situation.
This is really about making the right decisions, not "Manage more and faster or we're all going to die!".
For example, your crops are getting attacked by insects. It's exogenous yet if you wake up in the night to come out and kill them, you'll save more crops.
You'll rarely get worse results but it doesn't guarantee better results.
Which is exactly the sort of calculus that leads to people pushing so hard they actually do get worse results. See also: crunch culture.
So if I manually do a task rather an automate it, my results will be better?
> Only for executives? Sounds like a good move actually.
There's plenty of folks who fall for this, hook, line and sinker. There's plenty of Elon stans out there who actually believe he works 120 hour work weeks.
Perhaps it's not even a test but a kind of warning that layoffs of managers will happen regardless. Given that, what would game suggest as an optimal playing strategy?
Relatively high household and govt debt levels + anaemic growth causing central bank to lag on increasing rates to the level that the market sees as worthy of the risk.
Am I close? It's the AUD model but I figure it's close.
PRC got similar problem, but it's more they're producing too much talent than opportunties so involution happens. With like 50m more STEM + skilled labour on the way to add the the competition. But one saving grace is PRC has like 150 cities with over a million people that folks can fuck off too and still have decent quality of life. You can always lay flat and chill in a tier2/3 city nearly as vibrant as Seoul/Tokyo/Tapei with less cost of living. SKR/TW and somewhat JP is kind of fucked in that sense, most of the opportunities are in a few geopgraphic grinders where you have to be.
And while it’s not inaccurate to call Newport a self help author, he has studied, thought, and written about the subject for many years.
Hell if you really wanted to you might even be able to make an argument that, with hindsight, Microsoft saved Nokia by letting it gracefully jettison it's failing phone business, get a much needed cash injection, and refocus on other parts of its business.
[0] Of course some argue that Microsoft actually took over the day Elop became CEO, and everything he did was part of some plan to sink Nokia so that Microsoft could buy its phone business on the cheap.
But i don't believe it was a grand plan from MS to screw Nokia so they could buy it..
Some even suspect that MS just bought Nokia because Windows phone was not selling and Nokia was loosing money, so MS was afraid Nokia would turn to Android and they would loose their flagship devices..
So they needed to ensure a phone maker for Windows Phone and wanted go into making their own phones, Nokia had a good brand that they had a good relationship with and Elop was still there to make things easy..
On the other hand, if Nokia had focused on Android from the start or at least had devices on both systems, they had the potential to be the leaders on Android phones by now..
It was a costly and useless move.