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In 2010, a Samsung employee tipped me off to a leaked video of Samsung recruits standing in formation before a scoreboard displaying a motto. In black-and-white rococo regalia, including a cravat—attire as ornate as the military dress of a French musketeer—a cheerleader uttered a battle cry: “Youth with boiling blood, conquer the summer season!”
The phrase “pride in Samsung” was hoisted on a banner on a nearby hill amid the pine trees and fertile summer grass. Amid a sea of blue costumes and yellow capes, the recruits on the field smartly fell into formation in the shape of a trapezoid. Senior employees watched from the sidelines, behind the cheerleader, their company division identified by their color of dress.
“Victorious fighting spirit! Sensational telecommunications, team C!” the cheerleader shouted. She jumped in the air, then flung her right arm out, ruffles on her wrists, and snapped a forefinger in a white glove.
“Start!” The day’s recruits were the newest class to enter the gates of this silicon castle, at an event called the Samsung Summer Festival. They’d been preparing to join the knighthood of Samsung Men and Women for more than two weeks. They’d been through boot camps, hiked, and suffered sleep deprivation while learning to work together and treat each other as family.
Four Samsung recruiting divisions performed that day, each wearing its own distinct uniform, in what was meant to be a team-building exercise. It was meant to be fun. But the company elite were watching.
The recruits broke formation and sprinted outward to form a rectangle, picking up bags at their feet to create a checkered pattern using the Samsung colors of blue and white, spelling the word “victory” one letter at a time.
The recruits then formed the numeral “10,000,000”—the number of mobile phone sales that Samsung had set as a tar get. That year’s Samsung D500 handset—a simple, compact slider phone—had rung in a bonanza. The recruits formed a picture of the phone, followed by the word “champ,” before forming a digital watch with the word “hero,” then another mobile phone with the word “star.”
“It was amazing, scary and weird,” said a Samsung employee whose manager helped run the event. She and many others likened the pageantry to North Korea’s mass games ceremony.
A Samsung public relations executive, told of the comparison between Samsung and North Korea, told me over Korean barbecue one night, “That’s offensive. We are a company. Don’t compare us to North Korea. Compare us to Apple, IBM, HP.
“Yes, we’re secretive,” he admitted. “But so is Apple. The Samsung Man is just a stereotype . . . It’s not the company I see.”
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