> I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of very talented Samsung executives [...] people who are highly educated, highly competent. They know what they’re doing. They know both, say, the guts of a smartphone in addition to what business decisions need to be made to improve their company. And I’ve always gotten the impression that they can run the show themselves, that there’s really not much of a need this far into their corporate history for a founding family to oversee them.
This brought to mind the devastation of Boeing by MD corporate leadership. And Jack Welch. I suggest the author is undervaluing the avoidance of high-negative variance in top leadership.
The argument for stationary bandit gangs is not that they're wonderful executives, but that they have less toxic incentives than the roving bandit gangs they displace. Asset stripping Samsung, and Korea, is not something Wall Street, and some associated subcultures of corporate leadership, would be unhappy to help with.
Having a family at the top of a corporation does usually lead to the firm operating with long term vision more consistently.
Yes, if a Chaebol style leadership was in Boeing, MD corporate leadership wouldn't have gotten the chance to ruin Boing. We all know that the take over of Boing by MD leadership is why we have 737 Max.
I am sure there are many many hedge funds that would love to asset strip Samsung or any other chaebol of S. Korea.
> The argument for stationary bandit gangs is not that they're wonderful executives, but that they have less toxic incentives than the roving bandit gangs they displace.
One thing I like to think about is the concept of "home rule". Egypt makes an interesting case study:
By the time we can see the history of Egypt, the ruling class is seen by everyone, including themselves, as natives. (In fact, they are intrusive, but as with the ruling class of India, intrusions get forgotten over time.)
Eventually, a government collapse results in Libyan soldiers taking over the rule of Egypt. This is a disaster for cultural continuity -- this is when most of the pharaohs' tombs get robbed, by the new foreign pharaohs. It also results in formal inscriptions being written in vernacular Egyptian rather than Old Egyptian. After a relatively short run, home rule is reestablished, and formal Old Egyptian returns.[1]
More eventually, Egypt is conquered by Persia. This isn't great; the Persian emperor administers things from far away.
Egypt doesn't manage to throw off the Persians, but Alexander the Great does. Egypt is briefly part of Macedon. But Alexander dies soon afterwards, and his general Ptolemy gets Egypt out of the ensuing civil war.
Egypt is ruled by the Ptolemies for the next few hundred years. They aren't Egyptian and don't see themselves as Egyptian. They don't like the Egyptian masses and the masses don't like them. But! The Ptolemies have no power base outside Egypt. Unlike the Persian emperor, they live there, on location, and a problem for Egypt is directly a problem for them.
Eventually, Egypt is lost to Rome, and it suffers once again under the backwater treatment it got from Persia.
I don't have great information on exactly what the state of affairs was for the common man in these periods. But I strongly suspect that, as your analysis predicts, things were better under the Ptolemies, even though they were self-conceived foreigners who didn't really care for the Egyptians proper, than they were under the Persians and Romans. For Rome, as long as the grain was flowing, malaise and poverty in Egypt could be more of a plus than a minus, keeping Egypt subservient. For the Ptolemies, malaise and poverty meant defeat in war. They were in the process of going native -- Cleopatra was the first Ptolemy to be able to speak Egyptian -- when they lost it all to Rome.
[1] There was, separately, a homegrown Pharaoh who also made inscriptions in vernacular Egyptian as one part of his massive reform efforts. This got rolled back too.
Though the relationships with non-local rule can be complex. I saw a paper/talk about Ottoman Egyptian farmers disciplining local elites with work slowdowns and strikes. The loss would attract an impatient Ottoman official with a "fix this now, or else" attitude. So for instance, if a widespread beef with an elite family wasn't resolved to villagers' satisfaction, they might move out to stay with family in nearby villages, leaving village production to plummet, and the intransigent elite family to face official ire.
This brought to mind the devastation of Boeing by MD corporate leadership. And Jack Welch. I suggest the author is undervaluing the avoidance of high-negative variance in top leadership.
The argument for stationary bandit gangs is not that they're wonderful executives, but that they have less toxic incentives than the roving bandit gangs they displace. Asset stripping Samsung, and Korea, is not something Wall Street, and some associated subcultures of corporate leadership, would be unhappy to help with.