A cultural change will never happen without the likes of a Chairman Lee Kun-hee to lead, and lead, and slash, and lead, and slash, and lead. He truly did lead Samsung from the stone age to modernity by relentlessly demanding the desired behaviour (Quality, Not Quantity) from his underlings and by punishing back-sliders. His shoes are now empty.

Recently I was employed by one of their companies, Samsung Engineering Co., Ltd, and the culture of rewarding ineptitude and of accepting rigid self-serving idiots as leaders was staggering.

Samsung Group will survive because of its size and because the Korean government won't let it perish. But its 15 minutes of fame are over, as are the sunny days of fame and fortune in all of Korea.

My prediction is that all earlier profits will be lost and the company will be a stagnant third-tier player within 18 months.

Ha!
I now live in Australia. It has become clear to me that any field construction work here suffers from the fact that there is nil supervisory capability, and the whole industry can't organize its way out of a wet paper bag.

And then I woke up.

In virtually all US and Canadian installations, the hot water tank is nothing more than the equivalent to a well-insulated bulge in the pipe, heated either by an electric coil or by the chimney from a small gas or oil flame. The UK system of holding and pressure tanks and so on is based on abysmal flow rates from ancient municipal pipelines. Hot water in North America is typically more germ free than cold water in the UK and Europe.