Foothold
Dulmart.
A traditional powerhouse in Korea’s retail industry.
So well-known that even explaining it feels like a waste of breath.
Ordinary people know it better than anyone. Say you’re heading out to buy groceries and nine times out of ten, it’s Dulmart.
“Wh-what is this—”
“Chairman, explain yourself!”
“If you’re going to invite an outsider, at least make it someone with actual credentials…”
They themselves, of course, had no idea.
No idea what direction Dulmart actually needed to take.
That’s how it always is.
To the human eye, ants look like model cooperators. Reality is nothing of the sort. They appear to be hauling a load together, yet a few are simply hanging on—going through the motions of work and nothing more.
Same principle here. Every company is crawling with parasites who do nothing but suck down a salary. Especially among the executives.
“Why all the noise?”
“Chairman, this is a matter of the company’s prestige!”
“Prestige?”
“If word gets out that outsiders are wandering in and out, it will damage our image and credibility.”
An open secret. They hated, more than anything, having their own work put under a microscope.
If the cushy posts get exposed, it gets awkward real fast.
What exactly do executives do all day? It’s only natural that ordinary people have no clue. There is no fixed standard for the job. You can make yourself as busy as you like—or as idle as you like.
“The ‘prestige’ the directors keep mentioning…”
“Exactly.”
“Chairman, this isn’t a decision to be made lightly—”
“Are you talking about the stock price that lost a third of its value in six months?”
Silence.
“Or the market position we’re losing to Lupang? Is there a single director who can give me a clear answer on which one it is?”
The bigger the conglomerate, the worse it got. “Office politics” existed precisely because of men like these.
People who will work for them.
Even among executives there were ranks—not the simple titles of senior managing director or managing director, but something older and uglier. Connections. Just as chaebol heirs seized the chairman’s seat by bloodline alone, there were executives cut from the same cloth. No ability. No results. They had survived by stealing the achievements of younger directors in exchange for a little “trust.”
“Seems no one has an answer.”
“Chairman.”
“Something to say, Managing Director Jeon Ju-seong?”
“I understand Your feelings, Chairman, but… the board’s concerns also seem reasonable. It does feel rather abrupt.”
That was the basic architecture of office politics. To the old men who lived by it, a genuine performance review was the same as being ordered to swallow poison.
Which is exactly why they’re so allergic to outsiders.
He was almost certainly one of them. Seated closest to the chairman’s place of honor, a middle-aged man with a kindly face quieted the room with a single word. It told you everything about his standing here. Without knowing the details, you could still be sure he commanded considerable weight among the executives.
“Haven’t I explained enough already?”
“Yes. Which is why I’m offering a compromise. Why don’t we hear what perspective this outsider actually holds—whether it’s even something we can accept—and then decide? Unofficially, of course.”
The directors around the table nodded. Consensus formed in the quiet bobbing of heads. Anyone who had ever played the game of office politics understood the real meaning at once.
He wants to put the kid in his place.
There is a foolproof way to make every problem in the world look simple: just give unsolicited advice on someone else’s work.
The same thing happened constantly on internet streams. People who couldn’t do it themselves turned deadly serious over the tiniest mistake someone else made. And that exact dynamic played out inside corporations as well. That was why office politics were so terrifying.
Thud!
A hurdle of that size. He hadn’t walked in without expecting it. He knew full well he was standing in enemy territory.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Haha!”
“Hey now. This is the Dulmart boardroom. Do you think this is some mid-sized company?”
“I’m asking if you understand what it means.”
Shocked silence.
True to a major conglomerate, a high-definition large-screen television stood ready instead of a simple projector. He pointed at the material he had prepared.
Dulmart’s recent stock price. Having already been chewed out over it once, the directors’ faces were anything but bright.
“Ahem!”
“Cough.”
“It’s been a bit unstable lately, but… looking at the long term, I wouldn’t say it’s at a problematic level—”
“That is exactly the problem.”
Nearly three trillion won in market capitalization had evaporated. One could try to call it the popping of a bull-market bubble, but the chart already held the answer.
Chart junkies. Drawing lines all over the place and declaring where the price would go next was a way of treating investing like a joke. As a reference indicator, though, it still had meaning—especially when analyzing the past, where its accuracy ran high.
“Even when a chart breaks, it matters whether it breaks in an impulse or a corrective. Dulmart is breaking in an impulse.”
“What does that even mean?”
“This is not an IR department meeting!”
“Simply put, the market is devaluing this company.”
A five-wave decline is an impulse. A three-wave decline is a corrective. It simply counts how many times the price moved up and down in the same period.
If it were the latter, there would still be room for a rebound.
Every time the price dropped, bargain hunters would have stepped in. Why? Because the company was good. Conversely, without those bargain hunters the price simply slid—smoothly, steadily—lowering its support line as it went.
“That result is what the chart is showing. Breaking in five waves is a genuinely bad omen.”
“Omen?”
“Do you think this is some shaman’s ritual?!”
“If you know so much, you must have made a fortune in stocks already, haha!”
Laughter rolled around the table.
“I already have.”
Silence again.
Predicting the future from a chart alone was idiotic. But the fact that the past became visible was something you could not afford to ignore.
And I’m not looking at the chart alone.
Dulmart’s current situation. The directors knew it better than anyone. The atmosphere had flipped one hundred and eighty degrees from a year ago.
“Did the IR department put on any put-option hedges? Does anyone here know?”
“There was some partial hedging.”
“And now?”
“Now…?”
“If you’re taking the present crisis this lightly, I expect half the people in this room will be writing resignation letters a year from now.”
A competitor had appeared—one that was chewing into their market share with advantages they themselves did not possess.
A market-leading company always carries a premium in its stock price.
Some people bought the number-two company simply because its price looked cheap relative to operating profit. They did not understand how the stock market actually valued things. First place and second place did not sit on the same line.
Just as the chairman of the world’s greatest second-place company once said. A premium was priced into the stock—and that premium was now bleeding away. The market no longer believed Dulmart would lead.
Murmurs rose.
How serious the situation truly was. The directors who sat high up collecting their salaries on schedule had not known.
No—they simply hadn’t wanted to know.
Looking away from crisis was human instinct. The immediate indicators did not scream disaster either. They postponed and postponed. When the time finally came to take responsibility, office politics simply selected a convenient scapegoat and cut the tail.
“Ahem. Ahem.”
Chairman Kang Mu-yeol had sensed it as well. But a corporation was truly vast. Even a chairman could not know everything that happened inside it.
That’s why executives exist.
He received reports. And every report was inevitably mixed with the writer’s private opinions. Under-reporting. Obfuscation. If the materials contained errors, even the chairman would make the wrong call.
“I believe the reason I brought him here today has become clear enough.”
“Chairman.”
“This man still doesn’t know the company. Our own IR department is more than capable of handling this content, so—”
“I heard that same line two months ago. Has anything improved since then?”
Silence.
Incompetent executives. Men who survived on office politics. It wasn’t that the company didn’t want to cut them loose.
Like cancer cells.
At first you wanted them dead. But given enough time, coexistence became the only option. They made themselves impossible to remove. By the time you noticed, they had already spread like terminal cancer.
“Do you have an alternative?”
“It isn’t as though the field teams failed to grasp the problem. Results simply take time.”
“Limited budgets are also becoming something of an obstacle.”
Sympathy began to gather around the younger directors. They had not been ignorant of the problems.
Because they’re the ones who get fired.
They simply had no way to solve them. A structure in which young, capable talent was sacrificed so the old men could keep breathing. Office politics was profoundly inefficient—an incomprehensible phenomenon from an investor’s point of view.
“From where I’m sitting, this is not a comfortable conversation.”
“Our company is facing a minor difficulty, that much is true… but is it really a matter for an outsider to weigh in on?”
That very inefficiency was what paid their high salaries. The aging directors were doing everything they could to turn the room’s opinion. Giving advice was easy. They wanted an easy life. So he taught them reality.
“Online delivery has been making so much noise lately that Lupang is getting all the attention. If we put real strength into our own online platform, reclaiming market share is only a matter of time.”
“That’s right.”
“I agree.”
They were old, and they didn’t even realize it. Dulmart had not simply sat on its hands. The fact that online would become mainstream had been obvious for more than a decade.
Before Lupang there had been Auction, 22nd Street…
Everyone had known. And yet the reason a newborn company like Lupang had been allowed to seize the lead was, in the end, almost insultingly trivial.
“And how long is that ‘matter of time’ supposed to take?”
“Hmm… with about a year, I believe we could expect results, Chairman.”
“I could do it in a month.”
“Wh-what?!”
They had no idea. Even if twice that time passed, they would still produce nothing.
But by then they’ll have cooked up one or two convenient excuses, no problem.
The method by which aging executives parasitized a company: delay responsibility, delay again, and when it finally failed, manufacture a scapegoat and pin everything on them. They gnawed the company hollow for the sake of their own safety. Rather than waste tens of billions of won on men like that—
“I’ll double Dulmart’s app market share within a month. No—triple it.”
“……You will have to take responsibility for those words.”
He reminded them it would be better to give the money to him instead. They fundamentally misunderstood why Lupang was winning.
They’re completely deluded about what innovation actually is.
If innovation were complicated, the public would never choose it.