Samsung Ceo Quotes

July 1998, CEO Yun and nine other Samsung executives locked themselves up in a hotel and wrote their resignation letters. They made a pact that they would put the letters away for five months, at the end of which they would actually resign if they didn’t cut company costs by 30 percent.

There’s the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple’s rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone’s release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn’t withstand the shock. If, and it’s a big if, Tesla’s Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles. “I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They’re probably more like seven years away. But I hope I’m wrong.” Musk

Horizontal expertise paints on a far-reaching canvas. Say that you are an expert known worldwide for helping CEOs manage change in disruptive environments. Your expertise doesn’t come from understanding a vertical industry, like mining or media or consumer electronics or transportation. You just need to be sufficiently sharp to learn enough about a given industry to know how to apply your expertise in a given setting. In effect, you can work with any viable CEO candidate who wants to learn — regardless of the industry — as long as the primary challenges are defined horizontally, such as navigating deep change in the middle of disruption. Today you’re working with C-level executives at Samsung after their phones are banned on all airline flights, but next month you might be working with an executive in the hospitality industry facing a hotel worker strike. Or health insurance executives navigating an uncertain landscape that can never really see farther than two years. Each of these engagements is interesting because you have to apply your expertise to a new setting. But as much as you are learning, you’re taking two steps back for every three steps forward because much of what you learn with each new engagement is just the bare necessity in order to even be relevant. It’s interesting but challenging. Thrilling but exhausting. Engaging but distracting. There are cases, of course, where new clients regard your broad expertise as a significant selling point. They like that you can apply consumer insights to a professional B2B setting, or that you can help apply change management to consumer engagement. The first advantage of horizontal expertise, then, is how the application of expertise to many verticals always keeps the expert engaged and learning.