CEO & Leadership of Samsung - A Comparison to Apple

Samsung Gets The Medal: 3 CEOs vs Tim Cook

You may be surprised to learn that Samsung has not just one but three CEOs. In post since June 2012, Dr. Oh-Hyun Kwon is Vice Chairman & CEO. Then in March 2013, Samsung also promoted two of its presidents to CEO: most significantly for this discussion, Jong-Kyun Shin, who heads up Samsung’s mobile division, and also Boo-Keun Yoon, head of the appliances division. They do still both report to Oh-Hyun Kwonthough, so he maybe the more dominant player. As is common in the culture of Korean companies, Samsung hasn’t provided anything more than minimal bios for these executives, so we don’t know a huge amount about them beyond a handful of interviews that they have given over the years.

CEO & Leadership of Samsung - A Comparison to Apple

We do know that before he become CEO, Kwon oversaw Samsung's components business, which makes displays, chips, memory, processors, etc. Kwon helped lock down one of his division's biggest customers, Apple. Apple uses a lot of Samsung components in its mobile devices. Under Kwon, Samsung became the second largest chip maker in the world.

Mobile chief Jong-Kyun Shin has been the most outspoken, telling analysts last month that Samsung’s tablet business is growing rapidly and the company aims to topple Apple as the biggest maker of tablet computers too. He is equally ambitious for the Samsung brand, saying, “Our product innovation and marketing strategy have made Samsung the world's most preferred smartphone brand. Now we'll move from the most preferred brand to become one of the world’s leading aspirational brands.”

At Business Insider's IGNITION Conference, David Eun, executive vice president of Samsung's Open Innovation Center, shed some light on how the company has been able to see such great success despite such heavy devotion by Apple fans and customers: “Samsung is a very entrepreneurial story. The company set large goals for itself and has been bold in its execution.” He adds, “Seven years ago there was no iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone. It was all about Nokia and Motorola. It takes entrepreneurial ideas and execution. The leaders at Samsung are people who have risen and made their mark by being entrepreneurial.”

And it is still in the shadow of the visionary Jobs that Tim Cook is currently judged. Cook was a very competent logistics man and COO, but as Jobs himself expressed, “Tim is not a product person”. I see him as a ‘professional manager’ who risks managing processes rather than putting the next dent in the universe. He has done some good things, like improving internal collaboration and corporate governance, but he is not the great showman like Jobs and the jury is out on him.

It will be interesting to see the impact next year when Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joins Apple as SVP Retail & Online Stores – will they create more of a fashion and customer focused Apple? Maybe Angela will be Apple CEO in the future?

Overall, currently Samsung’s leadership has more momentum, as they are executing at speed, picking up customers, gaining market share and widening product range. Yet there are still big challenges.

Last week, amid investor concern and lower than hoped-for sales of the flagship Galaxy S4, Samsung called a “crisis awareness meeting”. Samsung has invited 600 management staff members to attend a four-day "global strategizing meeting" in mid December, where the main topic is ‘Crisis Awareness’. According to a report by ZDNet Korea, “As people are foretelling that downfall of Samsung is coming, they are trying their best to prevent such crisis from happening.”

While “crisis” at Samsung doesn’t sound great, it is good that the co-CEOs are facing reality and involving the wider management team. It contrasts favorably with Steve Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field”, which helped move mountains in product development, but often meant that he was abrasive and slow to acknowledge problems and challenges (e.g. iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’).