Bad Jobs vs. Good Chul-soo

Few can deny that Steve Jobs, who recently resigned as Apple CEO, is a great corporate leader. People call him the “reincarnation of innovation,” the “Michelangelo of the digital era,” or “one of the greatest Americans in history who uniquely combined an artist’s impression and a technician’s vision.” Few praise him for being a good CEO, however. Rather, the opposite.

Three months ago, CNNMoney covered how harshly Jobs treats his subordinates, introducing Apple as a mean workplace requiring exacting responsibility. In 2009, Fortune magazine named him “CEO of the Decade” but called him a "tyrannical perfectionist." Such a nature allowed him to change the music industry with the iPod, the cell phone market with the iPhone, and the media world with the iPad. Had he done business in Korea, could he have survived even after creating a shift, let alone growing hand in hand with record labels?

Ahn Chul-soo, Korea’s most revered CEO and the dean of the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology at Seoul National University, presents a contrast to Jobs. When he was a doctor, Ahn sat up all night to make free computer virus vaccines. When he set up a venture company, he gave shares to his employees. He declined an offer from an American company that wanted to buy his V3 vaccine for 10 million U.S. dollars, and so on. The story of AhnLab Inc. is heartwarming and a textbook moral example. So both the ruling and opposition parties want to bring someone like him who makes everybody happy to politics. Few would deny that he is a good CEO but whether he is a great CEO is quite doubtful.

“To evaluate Ahn Chul-soo as an entrepreneur, we should ask a more essential question,” Jeong Hae-yoon, a guest editorial writer of the Korean weekly Media Watch recently said in his column, “An Inconvenient Truth behind Ahn Chul-soo.” Jeong said Ahn is overvalued when it comes to essential issues such as if his company made technological innovations, whether he made investors rich, and whether he hired many employees. A country that wants only good CEOs and makes a textbook that values labor activists like Chun Tae-il more than entrepreneurs like Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chull and Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung cannot produce great CEOs. Korea need CEOs not just like a “good Chul-soo” but also like “bad Jobs.”

Editorial Writer Kim Sun-deok (yuri@donga.com)