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Entirely Incidental

Read the news of the demise of Samsung's chairman around the same time as I was reading How to Kill a Unicorn. The two diametrically opposite views of the company made me wonder who if anyone had it right in such stories. It's as if fact-checking has gone out of fashion along with many other standards that content should be held up to if it meant for the consumption of the general population. In the book, the author Mark Payne writes of Samsung:

The company’s scale is mind-boggling. With 2013 global revenues of $268 billion, Samsung is the world’s tenth-largest company. We’ve worked with them on many innovation challenges and have consistently been amazed by their ability to execute with brilliance and speed against the things they consider important. Most businesses reaching that kind of scale are slow to spot new opportunities and act on them. But Samsung keeps charging forward. Fast Company magazine recently celebrated Samsung as one of the world’s most innovative companies. Two of the four innovations that were cited were ideas we’d helped shape with their world-class innovation teams. In an age where every company talks incessantly about innovation, Samsung lives it, moving with remarkable speed and decisiveness.

The WSJ story leads with "Lee Jae-yong has the challenge of transforming the South Korean conglomerate after it has failed to keep pace with rivals"

Are they talking about the same company? The times we live in are such that a strong position one way or another should be treated with skepticism. Used to be that was the result of the writer having done their diligence and come up with an original insight. Today, it is more likely a messaging decision calculated to get the most buzz. Facts are entirely incidental. 



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