Case Study: Kim Woo Choong and Daewoo : Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Kim Woo Choong was a refugee in the Korean War. At the age of 14, he sold 100 newspapers everyday to feed his family at age 14. Armed with a Degree in Economics from Yonsei University, Kim started a trading firm in 1967 dealing in textiles with USD 10,000… and the ability to live by his wits. Soon he became an international player - manufacturing and trading in textiles and garments. He toiled long hours in pursuit of his dream; even visited his factories at night to motivate workers as delivery deadlines approached! However, Kim Woo Choong dreamt big. Later on he atarted an an enterprise, Daewoo – which in Korean translates to ‘Great Universe’ - which has seen meteoric growth and an equally dramatic downfall.Not one to be constrained by boundaries, he grabbed every opportunity that came his way, created some, and concentrated on possibilities. A workaholic in single-minded pursuit of his goals, he helped find for S.Korea a place of pride in the international market. He is under a cloud now, but the path he strode like a colossus marks him out as an exceptional entrepreneur.
His autobiography, Every street paved with gold, is a crash course in what it takes to succeed in business. It embodies the dynamism and the guts of steel that entrepreneurs require today to succeed in aggressively competitive markets. If there is only 1% chance of success in a project, the true businessman sees that 1% as the spark to light a fire, he observes. This distilled wisdom, it’s easy to conjure, came from his own success as he pitted his company against global competition!