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SEOUL, South Korea — An effective leader is a lazy one, said one of the key architects of South Korea’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 Oh Myung told The Washington Times in an interview. The diligent leader “puts his nose everywhere,” he said, 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,” said Mr. Oh, dapper in a tailored suit and handy with a PowerPoint. “Give them trust and delegate. Don’t look too closely.”
Mr. Oh helped engineer South Korea’s IT overhaul through four presidential administrations.
He has led the Korea Baseball Organization, spearheaded the 1993 Taejeon World Expo, served as president of two universities and chaired a major daily newspaper in Seoul.
His real contribution was as a government minister from 1981 to 2006, when South Korea was upgrading technologies and infrastructure at warp speed. The nation industrialized in the 1960s and 1970s.
The world knows modern South Korea through 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.
Astute entrepreneurs leveraging markets and free trade achieved the economic miracle with master planning from a farsighted government elite. Mr. Oh, slight in stature, stands as a colossus in master planning.
He played a core role in kick-starting South Korea’s IT revolution and creating two world-class physical infrastructure projects. 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 apply.
Being studious but “kind of weak,” he found KMA tough. Many fainted during austere training, and two fellow cadets died. Mr. Oh persevered. “After then, I have always been healthy,” he said.
At the academy, he learned to relate well with various 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 said, adding that charisma is overrated. “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. before entering government service. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His experience there straddled South Korea’s transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. Four administrations, both conservative and liberal, retained him as a minister.
“I have the least enemies,” he said.
That could be attributed to his inclusive, orchestrating approach. His motto: “Dream big, build with consensus.”
“When you make a plan, make it as big as possible so as many as possible can participate,” he said. “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 transformed the nation’s communications spine. He was promoted to minister in 1987.
In New York during the 1970s, he was astonished that students could get telephone lines. In South Korea at the time, it took a full year after a request for a telephone line to be installed. Mr. Oh vowed to radically accelerate the process from a request in the morning to installation in the afternoon.
He first got the ministry’s 80,000 employees on board by offering them rest lounges and devices to heat their lunches. 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 to expand telephone lines. In 1980, South Korea had 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 research and development budget was huge. “We required 10 to 20 million dollars but did not even have $1 million,” Mr. Oh said. He was told it was impossible, even reckless, to spend more.
After government officials were convinced, laws were enacted and funds were raised through bond sales. South Korea became the world’s seventh country with a homegrown TDX.
The private-public partnership saved some $5 billion in efficiencies. It also delivered spinoff benefits through related technologies, expanded worker skills and improved quality control. The private sector subsequently embraced the concept.
“Because of this, the whole trend of R&D changed,” Mr. Oh said.
His vision was not to equal the U.S. standard but to exceed it.
With Seoul hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics, Mr. Oh was advised to copy the information system connecting scoreboards and posting results from the Los Angeles 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 and connected computers at all the sprawling event venues without malfunctions.
In the early 1990s, he repeated the experience of creating TDX and improving on technologies.
Against companies’ wishes, Seoul adopted Qualcomm’s highly advanced code division multiple access, or CDMA, as the national mobile standard. South Korea was at risk of becoming out of sync with the rest of the world because other markets were using the less-advanced Global System for Mobile Communications.
CDMA gave South Korea the world’s leading mobile network. The country has maintained that distinction ever since.
“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
After heading the committee that organized the Taejon World Expo from 1989 to 1993, Mr. Oh was recalled to ministerial duties. He held the construction and transportation portfolios and oversaw two national projects.
The ever-expanding capital was engulfing the aging Gimpo International Airport, and South Korean leaders decided to build a new airport on reclaimed land off Incheon, Seoul’s bordering port city. Ground and tidal conditions were more favorable for construction than Japan’s competing Kansai International Airport. As a result, the development of Incheon International Airport was faster and smoother. It opened in 2002 and garnered global awards for its efficiency as a hub.
Mr. Oh insisted that the facility be “future-proofed” to accommodate expansion. Four runways operate 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. Traveling the length of the country on regular trains would take a day. The KTX does it in three hours. Because of its quiet technology, it can run at night.
It is to IT where Mr. Oh returns again and again.
IT as development accelerator
To ensure that IT benefits the entire population, Mr. Oh 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. Aided by an easy-to-input national script, Hangul, it is one of the world’s most digitally literate societies.
IT has also accelerated national and corporate development, Mr. Oh said.
“Informatization is the way to be an advanced country,” he said. 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.”
Multiple nations have invited Mr. Oh to advise on IT and development strategies. He has been received by eight foreign presidents. Washington’s role in the rise of South Korea should never be underestimated, he said.
South Korea’s successive postwar achievements of industrialization, informatization and democratization represent “the greatest success of U.S. foreign policy.”
He is 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 hope America will continue to maintain that legacy.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly spelled ex-Cabinet Minister Oh Myung’s name.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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