Free Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan by Frank Ahrens

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 minesin 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 onassembly 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