4 ideas
In August 2016 Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to get ahead of Apple's iPhone 7. Within weeks its batteries began catching fire, and Samsung issued a global recall. Some replacement units also ignited, and in October 2016 Samsung killed the product entirely at a cost of several billion dollars, showing how deadline pressure from the top can override engineering caution in a hierarchical firm.
In 1993 chairman Lee Kun-hee summoned executives to Frankfurt and ordered them to 'change everything except your wife and kids.' He wanted Samsung to stop pursuing volume as a cheap imitator and start competing on quality. In 1995, angered by defective Anycall phones, he had some 150,000 devices piled up and burned in front of employees at the Gumi factory, using a staged act of destruction to make a new quality standard impossible to ignore.
When one conglomerate generates a large share of a nation's exports and GDP, the state comes to depend on it, and legal accountability for its leaders erodes. Lee Kun-hee was convicted of bribery and later of tax evasion, yet he was pardoned both times, the second time in 2009 on the stated ground that he was needed for Korea's Winter Olympics bid. The pattern teaches controlling families that the penalties for crossing the law are temporary and can be negotiated.
Heir Lee Jae-yong was convicted in 2017 of bribing President Park Geun-hye through payments to her confidante Choi Soon-sil. Prosecutors said the payments were meant to win government support for the 2015 merger of Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries. The state-run National Pension Service backed that merger, and it strengthened Lee's control over the group. The case shows a family succession being arranged through state institutions, and it became central to the scandal that led to Park's impeachment.