Aisle 7, Seoul

When the CEO of the food company where I worked asked for a way to evaluate our salespeople, I ended up leading the project. What we built was a one-page weekly scorecard for every sales rep, combining hard numbers with the judgment of the people who worked alongside them. This is how it was put together, what it was used for, and what I'd keep in mind if you're building something similar. Where did the sales evaluation system come from? It started with an instruction from the CEO. The assignment landed on me as someone who already worked on sales planning and sales management, and I took the lead on developing it. I'd already spent years in the part of Korean sales that isn't selling: the planning, the reporting, the numbers behind the people in the field. Evaluating salespeople fits right into that territory, and it's harder than it looks, because a sales rep's results depend on things the rep doesn't control, like territory, customers and timing. What did...

  I quit a job in Seoul because of a commute that took close to four hours a day, and because I live with panic disorder. A long commute can be a real reason to leave a job, and in my case it was the deciding one. Here is what the numbers looked like, what it did to me, and what I'd check before accepting a job with a long trip. How long was my commute, really? At the fitness equipment company, getting to work took about an hour and a half each way. Plenty of people in the Seoul area live with numbers like that, and for a while I did too. The trip home was the part I hadn't priced in properly. The work there was heavy, so I'd often be at my desk well into the night, and by the time I left, the transport on my route ran far enough apart that the ride back stretched toward two hours. Add the two directions together and it came to close to four hours a day in transit. Then add the rest of the day around it. I was out of the house before seven in the morning, and on a night wit...

  Older Than Me, and Reporting to Me I've already written about how a Korean office runs on two separate ladders that don't always line up — rank on paper, and age in the room. Most of the time that mismatch is background noise. Twice in my career it became the main thing, once on each side of it. The chajang who was seven years older than me At one company, I was bujang and team leader. On my team was a chajang — one rank below me — who happened to be seven years older than I was. He was good at his job. Genuinely diligent, the kind of person who did the work without needing to be chased, and he'd made a decision at some point before I ever became his team leader: he'd stopped chasing further promotion. I don't know exactly when he made peace with that, or what it cost him to make peace with it, but by the time I was his boss, he'd clearly already settled into where he was. Being his team leader was not always comfortable. There's an asymmetry baked into a ...

  The Season When Everyone Suddenly Becomes a Rumour Mill There's a stretch of a few weeks, once a year, when a Korean office turns into something else entirely. The work doesn't stop, but it stops being the main thing anyone is actually thinking about. Promotion and reassignment season does that. Everybody already half-knows who's up this year, and nobody actually knows, and that gap is where all the talk lives. Who gets picked, and why it isn't always who you'd guess Here's something I noticed early and never stopped noticing. The person who's clearly good at the job — the one who actually carries the numbers, the one everyone quietly relies on — doesn't automatically get the promotion. Sometimes that person waits years longer than you'd expect, while someone else moves past them. Once you get to a mid-size company or bigger, there's a reason for this that nobody puts in writing but everyone understands. You need a line. Not a job title, a line...

  The Number Nobody Writes Down, and It Hasn't Moved in Twenty Years There's a rule in a Korean office that nobody hands you on your first day. Nobody puts it in an employee handbook. You just absorb it, usually the first time a wedding invitation goes around the team and you watch what everyone else puts in the envelope before you decide what to put in yours. The rule, for me, across every company, was almost embarrassingly simple. As a regular team member, fifty thousand won. Once I became a team leader, a hundred thousand. That's it. That's the whole system. A rule with no document behind it I've already written about how rank in a Korean office gets spoken out loud constantly — the ladder, the titles, who outranks whom by exactly how much. The cash-gift amount is the same logic, just quieter and more literal. Your position doesn't just tell you where you sit in a meeting. It tells you what number goes in the envelope. Nobody announces the figure. You learn i...

  The Real Reason and the Reason You're Allowed to Give Four job changes in twenty-three years. In some countries that's nothing. Here, people hear "four" and their eyebrows go up slightly, like you've admitted to something. I've had recruiters ask about it almost apologetically, as if they already know the number makes me look restless. I don't think it does. I think it means I figured something out a bit earlier than most people do. The question that's really always the same question Every interview I've ever sat through in Korea, across four moves and probably a dozen interviews that didn't go anywhere, has come down to one question dressed up in slightly different words each time. Why are you leaving your current company. Why do you want to leave. What made you decide now. It's always some version of that, and here's the part that took me a while to fully understand: everyone in the room already knows the honest answer, most of the ...

  The Question You Didn't Prepare For I've already written about how nobody ever gave me a stable rule for reporting — lead with the conclusion, no wait, walk me through it first. That was one kind of stress. This is a different one, and it never really went away no matter how many years I put in. It's the moment in a report to a vice president, or any senior executive really, when the question that comes back isn't the one you built your slides around. You can prepare for the questions you expect Most of a report is not the report itself. It's the night before, or several nights before, trying to guess what will get asked. I always did this alone. Not with the team, not with a junior colleague reading questions off a list at me — just me, going through the deck line by line, asking myself where I would attack it if I were the one sitting across the table. Where are the numbers soft. Where did I make an assumption I can't fully defend. Where is the gap between w...

  The Invisible Line Between Contract and Permanent There's a Korean drama — My Mister, one of the good ones — where the lead actress is on a contract position the whole way through. If you've watched it, you already have a decent instinct for what this post is about. If you haven't, the short version is that her situation gets treated, quietly and constantly, as different from everyone permanent around her, even when nobody says so out loud. I've never been the one on that side of the line. What I have done, a few times, is sit on the other side of the desk and decide whether someone gets to cross it. What actually separates them The obvious difference is pay, and it's real — a contract position pays less for what is often the identical job, sitting at the identical desk. What surprises people, I think, is what doesn't differ. Benefits, mostly, are the same regardless. Health coverage, the basic package — that line isn't where the gap sits. The real gap is ...

I Never Once Had the Time and the Money at the Same Time There's a version of this post that's just a list. Which of my six companies had the worst overtime, which had the best. That version exists somewhere in my head and it isn't very interesting. The actual pattern is stranger than a ranking, and I only noticed it by putting two very different jobs next to each other. Staying late because the room stayed late Early on — this would have been the early 2000s, at the start of all this — a good amount of the overtime I did wasn't really about workload. It was about the room. If your team was still at their desks, you were still at your desk, whether or not there was anything left on yours to actually do. Nobody wrote that rule down. Everyone followed it anyway. That thinned out over the years, and by the time I was further into my career the picture had mostly separated into two honest categories: places where the hours were long because there was genuinely a lot of work...

  Big Company, Small Company: What Actually Changes and What Doesn't Six companies. Two of them — Doosan and LG — count as what people here call daegieop, the big conglomerate-adjacent kind. The other four are what gets called jungsogieop, small and medium enterprises, even though "small" is doing a lot of work in that phrase; a furniture company or a soy sauce company with hundreds of employees is not exactly small. People ask me which is better, as if there's one answer. There isn't. But having sat on both sides of that line more than once, I can at least tell you where the real difference sits, because it isn't where most people assume it is. Where the gap actually opens up Pay and benefits. That's it, mostly. That's where the real, measurable gap lives. I've already written about what LG's holiday gift looked like next to a furniture company's department store voucher, and that gap runs straight through everything else — salary, healthc...

  What "Sales Planning" Actually Means, and Why It Made Me Everyone's Least Favourite Call When people outside Korea hear "sales," they picture one thing. Someone in a room with a customer, closing a deal, shaking hands. That is a real job and I've written about the people who do it — the ones who go collect the money, who sit across from a dealer who can't pay, who buy dinner they weren't supposed to buy. That was never actually my job. I sat one level back from all of it, in a role that doesn't have a clean English name. The closest is sales planning, sometimes sales support. What it actually meant, most days, was being the person nobody on the sales floor was ever happy to hear from. What the job actually was If I had to put it in one sentence: my job was to make sure the sales team could sell, and then check whether they had. That split into pieces that don't sound like each other at all. Pulling apart the numbers to see where the busines...

  What a Korean Company Gives You Twice a Year Twice a year, around Chuseok in autumn and Seollal in late winter, something changes at every Korean company I have ever worked for. Not the work itself. The work keeps going right up until it stops. What changes is that a gift shows up. Everyone gets one. Junior staff, senior staff, the same box handed down the same line, more or less. What's inside that box, though, turned out to say more about each company than almost anything else I could point to. Five companies, five boxes At the furniture company, it was department store vouchers. Emart, specifically — a set amount, spend it on whatever you needed for the holiday table, and nobody thought twice about it. LG did it differently, and the difference told you something about the company before you even opened anything. You picked your own gift from a list. A real list, with real options, and the value was noticeably higher than what I'd seen elsewhere. It wasn't flashy about ...

  Six Companies, Twenty-Three Years, and the One Decision I'd Change Doosan. A furniture company. LG. The same furniture company again. Ten years in food. A year in fitness equipment. Six first days. This blog has already told you about a few of the things that happened along the way — a car I couldn't park, a song I wouldn't sing, a dinner I wasn't supposed to pay for. What it hasn't told you is what changed and what didn't, across all of it. Twenty-three years is long enough to actually see the pattern, if there is one. There is, mostly. And then there's the one decision that still sits with me differently from the rest. What stayed exactly the same I expected the culture to shift company to company. It really didn't, not in the ways that mattered day to day. The rank system — the one I wrote about a few posts back, sawon up through bujang, the whole ladder — that structure followed me everywhere. Doosan had it. The furniture company had it. LG had it,...

  There Is No Right Way to Give a Report, and I Never Found One People ask what Korean workplace reporting culture is like, expecting a system. A format. Something you could write down and follow. I worked at six companies over twenty-three years. I never found the system. What I found instead was that the same report could be wrong in opposite directions on two consecutive days, from the same person. The instruction that isn't one Here is the one that got me every time, at every company, in every decade. You go in, you ask how to approach something, and you're told: do it this way. Plan A. So you go away and you build Plan A, properly, the way you were told to build it, and you bring it back. Why did you do it this way? You were told to. That's not really an answer you can give out loud, even though it's the true one. So you stand there and you explain the reasoning behind Plan A, which you didn't choose, as if it were your own idea, because at that point defending...

  The Ladder Game, and the One Song I Never Sang Hoesik. A company dinner, roughly, except that translation loses most of what the word is actually doing. A hoesik is not dinner with your coworkers. It is a piece of the org chart that happens to involve food. I sat through them as a junior employee. Then I ran them as a team leader. Those are two completely different jobs, and almost nobody talks about the second one. Where you sit is not an accident When I was on a team, not leading one, a good part of the anxiety of any hoesik was seating. Specifically, who was going to end up next to the team leader. At some of the places I worked, we actually drew for it. A ladder game — you know the kind, lines that zigzag and you trace your finger down not knowing where you'll land — decided who sat where. Which sounds almost sweet, reducing a hierarchy problem to a children's game, except everyone treated the result completely seriously. If you landed next to the boss, that was your nigh...

  The First Three Months Aren't About the Job Every desk looks like this before it's yours. I have started at six companies. Doosan, a furniture company, LG, the same furniture company again, ten years in food, and finally the fitness equipment company where I finished. Six first days. Six first three months. You would think it gets easier. It doesn't, not really. The company changes, the desk changes, but the first three months are always about the same thing, and it is never the job. What you actually learn Nobody hands you a manual for this, because it isn't written down anywhere. You learn it by watching. Who you're going to be working with. When people actually leave, as opposed to when the official hours say they leave. Who eats lunch with whom, and whether that is fixed or whether it moves around. The lunch thing sounds small until you are standing in it. Someone senior asks if you want to join them for your first lunch, and of course you say yes, because say...

  Nobody in a Korean Office Calls You by Your Name If you have watched any Korean office drama you have probably noticed this without quite noticing it. Almost nobody uses anybody's name. The subtitles quietly smooth it over, turning everything into "hey" or a first name, and the thing that is actually happening gets lost. What they are saying is the person's rank. Not their job. Their rank. There is a difference and it takes foreigners a while to see it. The ladder Most Korean companies run a grade system that people climb over a career. Roughly, it goes like this. Sawon, then gyejang, then daeri, gwajang, chajang, bujang. Six rungs, give or take. Gyejang has quietly disappeared at a lot of companies and some have flattened the whole thing, but this is the shape most people still have in their heads. You are not called by your name. You are called by whichever rung you are standing on, with -nim attached, which is a politeness marker with no real English equivalent....