제레미가 쓴 career goal

Once I saw a TV program, comparing the speed with which the Korean ladies who live and work near the ocean and the top class chefs in France can peal off oysters. To my amazement, the ladies were at least two times faster. Although merely a TV program intended to be fun, this to me was not funny because I have seen exactly the situation, over and over again while working in Korea during the past 10 years. At the E-Land, I was amazed to find out that 10 out 10 contracts that we had signed with brands from overseas such as Puma were more of “slave” contracts that are at least 500 pages long with over 90% filled with clauses that are disadvantageous for the E-Land. Even 10 years after the introduction of Puma in Korea, E-Land is still not making money out of it. I wondered why. After all, E-Land is supposedly the largest fashion and consumer goods company in Korea that hires Koreans from overseas and foreigners, and it has presence in many parts of the world, especially in China. But then, while negotiating with the Body Shop in person, after winning the right of a head franchisee, told me why. During meetings, the top people from E-Land could not say what we had talked about on our own. Where are our negotiation tactics? We had spent months developing them. Also, it didn’t help that the New Overseas Development Department, the department that is solely responsible for signing this type of contract was comprised of only four people, one who was very Korean (he was the leader), the other was also a Korean assistant manager who had not even once stepped out of Korea, while two others including myself were foreigners, but we were low rank-and-file. Even today, I heard from my former colleagues that the situation is not different at all, even after 15 years since my departure from the company. Since then, I have worked for other companies, including BCG where I got a chance to see many companies. And I realized that they are all the same. My goal is to help them to package better because they have so much to offer. For example, E-Land has excellent trade area analysis tools. Manually drafted, all the stores in a neighborhood are ranked. New ones are updated immediately as E-Land has commission system to compensate nearby stores when they report changes. The Body Shop people were amazed, and said they had never seen anything like it. This is just an example. After all, there must be a reason that E-Land is one of the top retailers in the world, but of course, no one outside of Korea knows that.