Reading the Administration
At eight in the morning, I headed to City Hall carrying the policy list I had organized through the night. The moment I arrived, I summoned Chief of Staff Kang Seol-heon and Vice Mayor Jin Mu-gyeol.
Jin Mu-gyeol had been appointed by the previous mayor — an administrative elite from Hankook University. He had originally been a central government bureaucrat, and was known as a man with almost no political coloring.
He valued principle and balance, leaned somewhat conservative, and was widely regarded as favoring pragmatic, realistic approaches.
A short while later, the mayor's office door opened and the two men stepped in, followed by several aides.
They were introduced as the working-level staff who would support the paperwork, but in truth they were a reconnaissance party, come to size up the young mayor who had just taken office.
I quietly set the policy documents down on the conference table.
Jin Mu-gyeol asked, "And this is… what, exactly?"
"Policy ideas I've been compiling in my spare time. I finished organizing them last night."
He flipped through a couple of pages, and his expression stiffened almost imperceptibly. Kang Seol-heon also turned pages in silence before her hand stopped. The document listed a hundred policy tasks in dense, unbroken columns.
Urban space reform, local circular economy, public welfare, organizational diagnostics, expanded citizen participation.
The fields were broad, the items specific — but there was no substance. It was a list of titles and nothing more. The look in their eyes was unmistakable.
Did he really make all of this himself?
Or is it plagiarized from somewhere?
The quick-witted Kang Seol-heon spoke first.
"Mr. Mayor, might I ask… what sources you referenced for this material?"
I smiled and answered. "I made it myself."
Silence settled over the room. Jin Mu-gyeol paged through the document again. Like the seasoned bureaucrat he was, he pinpointed the practical problem with precision.
"Mr. Mayor, the direction is clear, but… from a working-level standpoint, this could feel utterly overwhelming. With nothing but titles and no content, the departments won't even know where to begin. It'll be pure confusion."
I nodded and continued. "I'm aware of that. But isn't administration, by its nature, a process of finding consensus? If you hand down a fully detailed, finished plan from the start, the departments simply fall into passive compliance. This is a starting line. From today, as I receive the work briefings from each bureau director, I will personally verify how these tasks can be made real, department by department."
Jin Mu-gyeol frowned slightly. "Mr. Mayor, this is a rather aggressive approach. A bureaucracy can react badly to something this abrupt."
"That's possible. But change always comes with discomfort. What citizens want isn't 'cautious progress' — it's 'certain change.'"
I paused for a moment, studying their faces. Kang Seol-heon looked calm, as if she had expected this; Jin Mu-gyeol narrowed his eyes and studied me carefully.
"Isn't that how work is supposed to be done?"
With those words, I slowly straightened the documents again. Then I added one last thing.
"It's my turn to set the direction now. From this point on, we do things the unfamiliar way."
In Shiono Nanami's The Story of the Romans, which I read long ago, many people remember Julius Caesar as an emperor and a dictator.
In fact, however, he was never an emperor — he was a man who sought to end the Roman Republic and wield power for life as Dictator.
He pushed his reforms through relentless frontal assaults, and in the end he was assassinated by his opponents. His successor, Octavian, took power in an entirely different way.
While clashing with Antony, the most powerful politician in Rome, Octavian outwardly feigned cooperation and bided his time. Simultaneously, he ignited multiple crises, preempted political issues, and gave his rivals no room to respond.
In that way, he appeared to preserve the Republic while in fact seizing the power of an emperor — and became Rome's first true emperor.
I don't know much about politics, but I do know how things get done. Push through problems one at a time, and sooner or later you hit a wall.
So I have always pushed on multiple fronts at once.
It's simple. While the other side scrambles to respond to one problem, you set off new issues in succession — and in the chaos of them playing catch-up, everything else quietly moves forward.
You might think such a strategy worked better in ancient Rome, with no computers and no rapid flow of information like today. But modern society isn't so different.
In an organized society, a single organization struggles to handle multiple issues at once. In the end, everything except the issue commanding the most attention quietly slips beneath the surface.
The interesting part is that while the main issue is stirring up controversy, everything else actually proceeds smoothly.
The reason I can deploy this strategy with ease is that I studied urban planning.
A city is itself an aggregate of countless tangled problems — and coordinating and resolving them is precisely what urban planning is.
Take something as simple as laying down a single new road: it sparks endless debate. Some want a wide road to smooth the flow of logistics and traffic; others want the road narrowed and vehicle speeds reduced for the safety of children and the elderly.
Still others call for a Car-Free Street to revitalize the commercial district around it, while someone else insists that green space and street trees are what matter.
Urban planning is the process of weighing and coordinating all of these elements together. You don't simply look at a road — you consider the streets around it and the buildings that line it, and craft the optimal outcome.
While most people fixate on their own individual arguments, I weave all of these elements together and find my own answer. In the end, it is I who draw the city's big picture — and that picture takes shape in exactly the direction I want.
Jin Mu-gyeol's eyes narrowed. "Don't tell me… you intend to push these policies all at once?"
I smiled. "I may not know politics, but experience has taught me that work only produces results when you do it this way."
Spreading the policy documents I had built overnight, I added, "From this moment, Yeojin City's administration must be rewritten. Break through one at a time, and we'll hit a wall every time. So I will push on all fronts simultaneously. As I receive each department's briefing, I'll be throwing these policy proposals in with them."
"Is that… even possible?" Kang Seol-heon asked carefully.
"Whether it's possible or not — we'll find out by doing it."
I tapped my fingers on the desk. Vice Mayor Jin Mu-gyeol nodded slowly, as if turning my words over in his mind.
"I understand the direction you intend to pursue, Mr. Mayor."
His tone was as measured as ever, but I could read the meaning beneath it.
Jin Mu-gyeol was a quintessential career bureaucrat who had spent his life in public service. A man who prized rules and procedure, who preferred stable operations over sudden change.
And now a newly installed young mayor was demanding change in the name of reform. Not an easy thing for a man like him to accept.
I offered a light smile and added, "And Vice Mayor — as these policies move forward, please keep a close watch on how the civil servants react. Whether there are those who cooperate actively, or, on the other hand, those who respond half-heartedly or get in the way. Because in the end, administration isn't a battle over policy — it's a battle over people."
Jin Mu-gyeol's eyes narrowed slightly. He knew it too, of course. Change invites resistance, and this reform would not flow smoothly.
"Then… we begin moving in earnest today."
He let out a short sigh, then returned to an impassive face. I knew that even if he wasn't fully on my side yet, at the very least, he would be watching.
And so, the first work briefing began.
At ten in the morning, the department directors filed one by one into the mayor's office conference room.
Yeojin City is a small city. It has fewer than ten director-level executives, yet their portfolios are broad and complicated. Because of that, most detailed matters were handled through direct briefings by the section chiefs in charge of the actual work.
I placed the policy documents I had prepared on the desk and quietly watched them take their seats.
One thing surprised me. I hadn't distributed a single document yet, and already most of the civil servants were holding copies of the policy task list.
The email I sent this morning has already spread, huh.
A quiet chuckle rose inside me. I had sent the list — organized until dawn — through the Chief Secretary's office as an all-staff email just before work, and already each department had printed it out and was even circulating it among the executives.
Towering stacks of printouts on each desk, and the careful expressions of those turning the pages. Confusion, wariness, bewilderment, curiosity, indifference — the expressions all differed, but a shared tension lay beneath them all.
Of course, there was no way they had read the whole thing. Most had probably skimmed only the items related to their own department.
They had neither reason nor leisure to peer into other departments' policies.
But that didn't matter.
What I wanted to know was how fast they would react.
What approach they would take toward me.
And in this first meeting — who would be the ones who move, and who would be the ones who hold the line.
The meeting hadn't even started, and already a great deal of information was flowing in.
The briefings began. The directors and section chiefs of each department rose in turn and presented their prepared reports.
But I paid closer attention to their reactions than to their words. More important than what they said was the gap between their expressions and their tone.
Noh Chae-eun, Head of the Planning and Budget Division, rose from her seat and walked the room through the city's finances as a whole.
"The total size of Yeojin City's 2025 budget is approximately one trillion won."
On the surface, that sounds like a considerable sum. But for a mid-sized city of one hundred thousand people, it's exactly average. What mattered more was the structure inside it.
Director Noh flipped straight to her materials and got to the point.
"The city's own revenue is roughly 98 billion won. The remaining 90 percent or more comes from central government subsidies and the local share tax."
I already knew this, but Noh Chae-eun drove the point home with absolute clarity. In a single sentence: Yeojin City is a city that cannot stand on its own.
Citizens sometimes say things like, "With a trillion-won budget, isn't the mayor basically a king?" — but that's a story from an entirely different world.
Most national subsidies come with their Purpose designated — welfare money for welfare, education money for education. Not a single won can be redirected at will. Even a mayor cannot touch it.
On top of that, there's the matching system. If the central government sends down 100 billion won, Yeojin City must shoulder at least 10 percent itself. And that burden drains straight out of the city's own funds.
When you account for everything, the budget a mayor can actually spend at his own discretion amounts to perhaps 10 to 20 billion won at most — a few percent of that trillion.
Noh Chae-eun explained this structure very slowly, very precisely, walking through each number one by one with an air of in case you didn't quite follow.
She was probably worried that the young mayor, ignorant of reality, would charge headlong into reckless projects. Or perhaps it was the opposite — an advance warning: don't even think about it.
I nodded along as I listened. Outwardly I said nothing, but inside, my thoughts were churning.
A budget is not a set of numbers — it is the topography of power. I knew this structure well already. I was someone who had spent years clashing with the Ministry of Economy and Finance dozens of times — writing planning documents myself, piecing together project funds, chasing national competitive grants.
The only difference now was that I sat on the other side of the table, in the decision-maker's chair. How I would use it, where I would strike — that was where the real game began.