SEOUL, South Korea — An effective leader is a lazy one, according to one of the key architects of this country’s trailblazing information technology revolution.
“A smart and lazy person has a better chance of being a great leader than a smart and diligent person,” octogenarian Myong Oh told The Washington Times in an interview. The diligent leader “puts his nose everywhere,” he explained, while the lazy one gives subordinates “room to work.”
“A leader should be responsible for the outline, and let his people take care of the details,” Mr. Oh, dapper in a tailored suit and handy with a PowerPoint despite his age, insisted. “Give them trust and delegate! Don’t look too closely!”
Mr. Oh knows a bit about leadership, having helped engineer South Korea‘s IT overhaul through four different presidential administrations.
He has led the Korean Baseball Organization, spearheaded a World Expo, presided over universities, and has even chaired a daily newspaper.
However, his real contribution was as a government minister between 1981 and 2006, a period when South Korea, which had industrialized in the 1960s and 1970s, was upgrading technologies and infrastructure at warp speed.
The world knows modern South Korea through the companies whose products have conquered the world: industrial titans such as Hyundai, LG and Samsung, and the creative talents behind cultural achievements such as “Parasite,” “Squid Game” and K-pop’s BTS.
However, the “Economic Miracle” was not achieved only by astute entrepreneurs leveraging markets and free trade. Instead, master planning for the transformation was done by a far-sighted government elite. In that latter category, Mr. Oh, slight in stature, stands as a colossus.
He played a core role in kick-starting South Korea‘s IT revolution and in the creation of two world-class physical infrastructure projects. And he managed them all without an MBA.
KMA, not MBA
Mr. Oh credits the Korea Military Academy (KMA) he attended in the 1960s for the leadership lessons he would later apply.
Being studious, but small and “kind of weak,” he found KMA tough. Many fainted during austere training, and two fellow cadets died. But he persevered. “After then, I have always been healthy,” he said.
At the academy, he learned to get along with different personalities. “Now, I am more liable to accept people around me,” Mr. Oh said. “I became more generous and learned leadership.”
The core lesson: “Be someone who everyone could follow,” he recalled. Charisma, by contrast, is overrated, he says. “You should love your co-workers and provide them a happy environment.”
He transitioned from the army to academia in South Korea and the U.S. — he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook — before entering government service. His experience there straddled South Korea‘s transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. Unusually, he was retained as a minister by four separate administrations, both conservative and liberal.
“I have the least enemies!” he said.
That could be due to his inclusive, orchestrating approach: His motto, he says, is, “Dream big, build with consensus.”
“When you make a plan, make it as big as possible, so as many as possible can participate,” he advised. “Until you make a final decision, you have to go through every process.”
After that, it’s full steam ahead. “Once I make a final decision, I never back down … even if the president or National Assembly says something,” he said. “That is why my co-workers trust me!”
Mr. Oh leveraged that trust to push through a succession of nation-changing projects.
Transforming telecoms
As vice minister of post and telecommunications in 1981 — he was promoted to minister in 1987 — he would transform the nation’s communications spine.
As a student in New York in the 1970s, he had been astonished that even students could get telephone lines. In South Korea at the time, it took a full year from a customer’s request for a telephone line to its installation. Mr. Oh vowed to radically accelerate the process — from request in the morning to installation in the afternoon.
First, he got the ministry’s 80,000 employees on board, offering them rest lounges, and even devices to heat their lunchboxes. He undertook nationwide seminar calls over the ministerial broadcast system on topics such as, “What will the information society in the year 2000 be like?”
He spun off and privatized elements of the sprawling ministry. In doing so, he separated the government’s data and telecommunications regulatory arms, while creating technology-specific research and policy institutes.
The first goal was expanding telephone lines: In 1980, Korea boasted just 2.8 million. By 1987, there were 10 million.
The key technical breakthrough was creating a Time Division Exchange (TDX) telephone-switching system, upgrading routing from mechanical to electronic systems.
The R&D budget was huge. “We required $10-20 million dollars, but did not even have $1 million,” Mr. Oh recalled. He was told it was impossible, even reckless to spend more.
However, after government officials were convinced, new laws were enacted and funds raised through bond sales, South Korea became the world’s seventh country with a home-grown TDX.
The private-public partnership saved some $5 billion in efficiencies. It also delivered spinoff benefits in the form of related technologies, expanded worker skills and improved quality control, a concept subsequently embraced by the private sector.
“Because of this, the whole trend of R&D changed,” Mr. Oh said.
His vision was not just about equaling the U.S. standard, but exceeding it.
With Seoul hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics, Mr. Oh was advised to copy the information system connecting scoreboards and posting results from the prior Los Angeles-hosted Games, which used a central server.
He went one better. Putting telecom and computer engineers together, his team created a pre-internet system of hub-and-spoke, connected computers at all of the sprawling event’s venues. There were no malfunctions.
The experience of creating TDX — and of going one better than prior technologies — was repeated in the early 1990s.
Against the wishes of companies, Seoul decided to adopt Qualcomm’s highly advanced Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, as the national mobile standard. There was a risk South Korea would be out of sync with the rest of the world, because the less advanced Global System for Mobile Communications was already widely used in other markets.
But the decision to go with CDMA gave South Korea what was at the time the world’s leading mobile network — a distinction the country has maintained ever since. It also gave South Korea a unified standard used across the country.
“I said we had to emplace the same standard across the whole country,” Mr. Oh said. “That was physical lines, but after we went mobile, it was the same principle.”
Physical infrastructure
His experience was not limited to telecommunications policy. After heading the committee that organized the Taejon World Expo from 1989 to 1993, Mr. Oh was recalled to ministerial duties, holding both the construction and transport portfolios and overseeing two key national projects.
With Seoul‘s aging Gimpo Airport engulfed by the ever-expanding capital, the decision was made to build a new airport on reclaimed land off Incheon, Seoul‘s port city. Ground and tidal conditions there were more favorable for construction than Japan’s competing Kansai Airport, with the result that Incheon International Airport’s development was faster and smoother. It opened in 2002, and has since garnered multiple global awards for its efficiency as a hub.
Mr. Oh insisted that the facility be “future-proofed” to accommodate expansion down the line. Four runways are in operation, adjacent to a temporary (but profitable) 36-hole golf course. When additional runways are required, they will be built over the fairway, Mr. Oh said.
He also oversaw the KTX bullet train project. A blend of France’s TGV rail technologies and homegrown engineering, the KTX began service in 2002. Regular trains formerly took a day to travel the length of the country; the KTX does it in three hours. And due to its quiet technology, it can run at night — unlike aircraft.
But it is to IT that Mr. Oh returns again and again.
IT as development accelerator
To ensure that IT benefits the entire population, he created nationwide centers training seniors and housewives who lacked computing education.
When recruiting women proved a challenge, he put forth a compelling message: “What if your kid watched porn? What if your husband has an affair by email?”
It worked. Today South Korea is home to some of the world’s finest broadband and mobile infrastructure, and — aided by an easy-to-input national script, Hangeul — is one of the world’s most digitally literate societies.
IT has also accelerated national and corporate development, Mr. Oh said in the interview.
“Informationization is the way to be an advanced country,” he argued. Information technology “does not develop [just] itself, it develops other sectors. Autos used to be just mechanical products, now they are IT, and it’s the same with aircraft, rail, even space.”
Given his remarkable resume, Mr. Oh has been invited by multiple nations to advise on IT and national development strategies, and has been received by eight foreign presidents. Washington’s role in his country’s rise, he added, should never be underestimated.
South Korea‘s successive post-war achievements of industrialization, informationization and democratization represent “the greatest success of U.S. foreign policy.”
He is also proud that South Korea‘s infrastructure, from its “zero dead spot” national 5G mobile network to its 420 km/h KTX, has bypassed the systems on offer in the U.S. He expresses concern about the fraying of the America that so impressed him as a student in the 1970s.
“U.S. capitalism and democracy used to be something that everyone looked up to,” he said. “Now, I have a feeling it has lost its momentum. I hope it regains it.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.