Chung Ju-yung and Lee Kun-hee: 2 Quotes That Still Run Samsung and Hyundai
Photo by Ryoo Geon Uk on Unsplash
Two sentences, both said in anger, still shape how Samsung and Hyundai operate. The first is "이봐, 해봤어?" — "Hey, have you tried it?" The second is "마누라와 자식 빼고 다 바꿔라" — "Change everything except your wife and children."
Neither is a motivational poster. Both were delivered at specific meetings, about specific failures. One explains why Korean companies charge at problems before the feasibility study is finished. The other explains why Samsung turned obsessive about quality after a decade of losing to Sony and Panasonic.
Here's what each one actually meant, what triggered it, and how to read it when a Korean manager drops it in a meeting.
"Hey, have you tried it?" — Chung Ju-yung's shipyard on a sandbar
Chung Ju-yung (1915–2001), founder of Hyundai, said this to his own executives. The story Koreans tell: he announced plans to build the world's largest shipyard on a sandy stretch of Mipo Bay in Ulsan, and his Hyundai Engineering & Construction managers told him, more or less in unison, that it couldn't be done.
Hyundai had never built a cargo ship. One of Chung's own engineers reportedly called the idea impossible. Chung's reply, in Hyundai's own English rendering:
How can you know it's impossible if you haven't tried it?
The shipyard got built, and the site grew into one of the largest shipbuilding complexes in the world. The quote appears in his autobiography, published in English as There Are Trials, But No Failure.
The other half of the legend is the 500-won banknote. Chung reportedly pointed to the turtle ship engraved on Korean currency — a 16th-century armored warship — as evidence that Koreans had been building advanced vessels centuries before Europe industrialized. The finer details of that pitch are best treated as folklore; versions vary by teller. But the argument style is pure Chung.
Why this quote won't die
Chung was born in Tongchon, the eldest of seven children, and left his rural village as a teenager for Seoul. He named his first venture "Hyundai," meaning "modern times," and founded it as a construction company in 1947.
From there he rode government-backed industrial policy into shipbuilding, autos, and heavy industry, building one of Korea's largest chaebol groups. He remained the group's dominant figure until his death in 2001.
Hyundai's logistics affiliate, Hyundai Glovis, still tells employees that "Hey, have you tried it?" is probably the founder's most famous line — and that the harder a situation gets, the more the phrase should push you to act.
My read: this is the founding scripture of Korea's ppalli-ppalli ("hurry-hurry") execution culture. The upside is real — Korean firms ship faster than almost anyone. So is the downside: the phrase is structurally a way for the most senior person in the room to override every objection at once. That's exactly why younger Korean workers now quote it ironically.
Korean commentators have noticed. One columnist pushed back on applying a titan's success formula to ordinary employees, and cleverly repurposed Chung's grammar as a demand for consultation instead of blind charging: "Hey, did you even ask the landowners? Hey, did you even meet the people who filed the petition?" Same phrasing, opposite politics.
"Change everything except your wife and children" — Frankfurt, June 1993
On 7 June 1993, Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee flew presidents and executives from around the world to the Kempinski Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany, and delivered what Samsung now calls the New Management Declaration (신경영 선언).
The famous line came with a fuller framing that rarely survives translation:
In the end, I have to change. If you're going to change, change thoroughly — change everything except your wife and children.
And here's the part Western readers almost never hear: in the same session he reportedly told executives to abolish the attendance register. Stop clocking in. Work anywhere, as long as you're actually thinking. Work through the night for six months if needed, then rest for six months.
That reframes the whole quote. It isn't "work harder." It's "attendance theater is worthless; output and thinking are the only things being measured." In 1993 Korea, that was a genuinely radical thing for a chaebol chairman to say.
The two triggers: a knife and a report
The declaration didn't come out of nowhere. Two things are widely cited as setting it off.
- The washing machine video. An in-house broadcast showed Samsung workers shaving defective washing-machine parts with a knife so they'd fit. Lee was reportedly enraged.
- The Fukuda Report. Fukuda Tamio, a design adviser Samsung had recruited from Japan's Kyocera a few years earlier, wrote an internal analysis of why his proposals kept dying inside Samsung — and why the organization structurally rejected them.
Context matters here. In 1993 Samsung was losing ground to Japanese electronics makers, had no real answer to Sony or Panasonic, and couldn't shake a cheap-product image. The bluntness of Lee's language is itself the best measure of how bad things were.
The bonfire that made it real: Gumi, 1995
Declarations are cheap. What made this one stick happened on 9 March 1995, at Samsung Electronics' Gumi plant.
In front of roughly 2,000 assembled employees, Lee had some 150,000 units — Anycall mobile phones, cordless phones, car phones, fax machines — piled up and burned. Korean business lore calls it the hwahyeongsik, the "cremation ceremony."
| Moment | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| New Management Declaration | 7 June 1993 | Kempinski Hotel, Frankfurt |
| Gumi "cremation ceremony" | 9 March 1995 | ~150,000 units burned before roughly 2,000 staff |
| Anniversary retrospectives | Three decades on | Korean media still runs them annually |
What followed is the part now credited across Korean business media: quality innovation as the top corporate priority, a premium branding strategy replacing the discount image, a looser organizational culture, and a hard concentration of resources into semiconductors, displays, and later smartphones.
Why both quotes still matter in 2025
These aren't museum pieces. Current Samsung leadership speaks in exactly the same register. At a recent executive seminar framed around restoring "Samsung-ness," Chairman Lee Jae-yong said the company stands at a crossroads of life and death and must break through with the resolve of sajeuksaeng (死卽生) — "die in order to live."
Korean press covered it explicitly as a sequel to his father's 1993 line. Same playbook: name the crisis loudly, demand total change, then look for a Gumi-style symbolic act to prove you meant it.
How to actually use this if you work with Korean companies
- When you hear "해봤어?" — the meeting is effectively over. A decision has been made and you're being asked to execute, not to re-litigate feasibility. If you have a real objection, bring data and a version of the plan that works, not just risk.
- When leadership declares a crisis — take it literally. Chaebol crisis rhetoric often precedes reorganizations, portfolio cuts, and resource concentration, not just a pep talk.
- Watch for the symbolic act. Frankfurt only became history because of Gumi. A declaration with no costly, visible follow-through is one you can safely discount.
The honest summary: Chung's quote gives you speed and Lee's gives you standards. Korea's biggest companies are what happens when both are enforced from the top with almost no room to say no.
That combination built global champions in roughly one generation. It also built the exact management culture Korea's younger workforce is now arguing about — and that tension is the real story behind both lines.
FAQ
Did Lee Kun-hee really mean employees should change everything about their lives?
The line was deliberately shocking, but the surrounding instructions were about work quality, not personal life. In the same Frankfurt session he reportedly told executives to scrap the attendance register and said work could happen anywhere as long as you were genuinely thinking. The target was Samsung's culture of appearances over substance.
What is the Fukuda Report?
An internal analysis by Fukuda Tamio, a design adviser Samsung recruited from Japan's Kyocera around 1990. It documented why his improvement proposals kept failing inside Samsung and how the organization itself rejected outside input. Along with the "washing machine video," it's cited as one of the two direct triggers for the 1993 declaration.
Is "Hey, have you tried it?" a compliment or a warning?
Context decides. From a founder it reads as visionary defiance; from a middle manager to a junior employee it can read as "stop raising objections." Many younger Korean workers now use it ironically for exactly that reason, and some Korean columnists have flipped the phrasing into a demand for consultation rather than obedience.
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