Management Toolkit

Words of wisdom from LG's 'foolish' old man

Aloysius Choong CNETAsia

Published: 09 Dec 2004 16:35 GMT

In the village of Jizhou, there once stood the two mountains of Taixing and Wangwu. Yu Gong, a 90-year-old grandfather, lived to the south, and often had to travel long distances to get around the mountains. He was deeply troubled by it.

One day, he decided to level the two mountains: grain by grain, rock by rock. "You are deluded, Yu Gong," Hequ's Zhi Sou told him. "You are already so old and weak. You cannot even pull out a blade of grass. How will you be able to shift the mountains?"

Undeterred, Yu Gong replied: "Your mind is too inflexible. Even if I die, I have my children, my grandchildren and all their scions. My line will go on and on, but those two mountains can never get taller or bigger -- what do I have to worry about?" With this, he silenced Zhi Sou.

The story of Yu Gong is one that LG Electronics CEO Kim Ssang Su often alludes to. He wants to see Yu Gong's grit and determination in his employees.

"If one steadily strives in his work, he will eventually achieve something great," he said in this interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNETAsia.

At the same time, Yu Gong -- whose name literally translates to "foolish old man" -- might not have been as smart as Zhi Sou (meaning "intelligent gentlemen"). But perhaps because of this, he was not constrained by the preconceptions of smarter people.

The two values are very much evident in Kim himself. He admits that he "works very hard", waking up at 0530 sharp each morning to exercise and prepare for the day. "When I think about how my judgment and actions as a CEO will determine the lives of tens of thousands of people, I cannot stop working, even for a moment," he writes on his personal Web page.

He is also well-known for declaring that a 5 percent productivity gain is difficult, but a 30 percent target is, ironically, achievable.

The reason? A seemingly impossible problem forces executives to think outside the box for a solution.