Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (36 page)

I had some time before my flight once I got to Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, named for another strongman who’d built his country during the 1960s, like Korea’s Park Chung-hee. I typed out an e-mail to an old
Washington Post
colleague named Jeff Birnbaum. Jeff was a top-tier Washington journalist for the
Wall Street Journal
and
Fortune
for many years before coming to the
Post
’s business section. It was only an accident of fate that briefly made me his editor, a task I was in no way prepared for. Jeff and I had one big thing in common: like me, he had left journalism for PR a few years earlier. Now he was heading the practice at BGR Group, a well-regarded lobbying and PR firm back home in Washington, D.C. I hadn’t spoken to Jeff for months and knew little about his firm and even less about doing PR in an agency setup, servicing multiple clients. I gave him a brief update on our situation, saying that Rebekah and I were both doing well professionally but that the separation was tougher than we expected. I had no expectations but suppose in hindsight I was fishing a little bit. I sent the e-mail, packed away my iPad, and got on the flight. When I landed in Seoul and opened my e-mail, I saw Jeff’s reply:

Thanks for the note. I’m glad to hear all is well except for that terrible separation. How long are you locked into your current gig? I’m looking to hire a senior colleague.

I couldn’t believe it. Could this be the answer to prayer, late as it was offered up?

I forwarded the e-mail right away to Rebekah in Jakarta. I wrote, “Ready to go back to D.C.?”

I got back in touch with Jeff and told him my particulars and that I’d discuss things with Rebekah. But to me it already felt like a foregone conclusion, if Jeff’s firm would have me. This was the only way I could see of getting the family back together without taking an economic hit—if we could work it out so Rebekah could transfer from the embassy in Jakarta to State Department headquarters, or “Main State,” back in D.C. My big concern was Hyundai. I had signed a contract that ran until October 2014. Would the company let me out of the contract early? Would there be legal or monetary penalties? I had no idea what my employee rights were in Korea.

I needed to hire a lawyer. But this time I prayed first.

24

THE JUDGMENT OF GENESIS

My arrival in Korea coincided almost perfectly with Hyundai’s grand and risky gambit to remake itself as a premium brand, a quest launched at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2011. I didn’t know it at the time—it was three years off—but the first ground-up, one-hundred-percent-new car that that was meant to carry these premium aspirations would be the second-generation Hyundai Genesis. The arc that started at the beginning of 2011 would conclude at the end of 2013 with the launch of the new Genesis and, as it was increasingly seeming, with my time at Hyundai.

After years of research, engineering, design sketches, clay models, prototypes, tests, executive decisions, and finally assembly, it was time to turn the new Genesis over to the public. Its first test would be the harshest: my team would host a group of top-tier U.S. motoring journalists in Korea. They would be the first foreigners in the world to test-drive Genesis.

Genesis was the bar that Hyundai had set for itself. Although it was unfair to judge an entire company on the basis of one car, in reality, if Genesis failed to excite—if Hyundai failed to make the pivot from value-for-money automaker to premium car builder—then Hyundai’s metaphorical midlife crisis would turn into an actual one. If Genesis was ho-hum, if it were judged a less-than-premium vehicle, Hyundai would have to wait three more years—until its next Equus luxury sedan was released—to try again. This would be a disastrous setback for the company’s strategy and, not to mention, sales. If Genesis did not satisfy, it would not sell.

The big engineering advances between the old and new Genesis had less to do with features or gimmicks. The car did have an automatic braking function that would stop the Genesis on its own if a person ran in front. It even had an industry-first carbon dioxide sensor. If the carbon dioxide level inside the car got too high, the new Genesis would automatically open the vents to prevent the driver from getting drowsy.

But the heart of the next-gen Genesis was improved drivability. Hyundai wanted to build a car that could run the road with the German luxe sedans. To do this, Hyundai engineers had to reduce what is known in the industry as NVH, or noise, vibration, and harshness. To achieve this, engineers started anew. The new Genesis shared no common parts with the previous one, making it more expensive to produce. British racing legend Lotus was brought in to improve the steering feel of the new Genesis, to increase road feedback, and to maximize response and driving pleasure of the driver. A new eight-speed transmission was introduced to match the eight-speed gearboxes found in Audis, BMWs, Bentleys, and Jaguars. A new all-wheel-drive system was built for Genesis to give it better handling and improve sales in snowy North America. The amount of high-strength steel—
made by Hyundai Steel—in the new Genesis was significantly increased to improve its safety, rigidity, and feel of tightness on the road. In the previous Genesis, the suspension on the left and right sides of the car were linked. In the new Genesis, left- and right-side suspension were independent, allowing it to better adjust to road conditions and improve handling. Every joint and gap was insulated and caulked to eliminate road noise.

We brought the U.S. auto journalists to Korea. For the next week I would have to place my escape plan and thoughts of family reunion on hold. This required my full attention. Hyundai, Genesis, and my vice chairman deserved that. We put the journalists up at a luxury hotel in Gangnam, hoping to impress them with the best that Korea had to offer. We took them to top-end restaurants. We had designers and engineers give them briefings on what they’d done with the new car. Then it was money time. We took the journalists to the test track at the Namyang R&D center and put them behind the wheel of the new Genesis. But, to prove our point, we needed to do more than that. If we wanted the new Genesis to compete with the best of Europe, that had to start right here. At our test track, we lined up the new Genesis next to an old Genesis, the obvious comparison. But next to these we parked a Mercedes E-class and a BMW 5-series, our new chief rivals. We wanted the journalists to see how much better than its predecessor the new Genesis was, and then we wanted them to step right out of the new Genesis and into the Benz and BMW. This would be like an up-and-coming chef opening a new restaurant and placing his signature dish before an influential food critic—then inviting the town’s most established chefs to come over to do the same. What we were doing was nuts.

The journalists appreciated our chutzpah and, admittedly, the chance to zip around in the high-end German cars as well. No test drive ever lasts long enough for an auto journalist; this is
true if you let them have the car for a month. But we gave them more time with our new Genesis than we typically gave visiting media, and we let them take it on a couple of different test tracks, with curves and straightaways. This was my first chance to drive the new Genesis, too. Even non-gearheads can tell when they’re riding in a luxury car. The body feels tighter, quieter. The high-tech, well-damped suspension barely transmitted road bumps that would rattle your teeth in a cheaper car. After a couple of turns in the new Genesis, I thought, “I can feel the money.”

You don’t get a lot of meaningful instant feedback from auto journalists right after a test drive. So I held my breath for the next couple of weeks until the reviews started to appear, trading anxious e-mails with my colleagues back in the States.

Finally they came out.
Autoweek
wrote, “The coming Genesis is worthy of spearheading Hyundai’s new aim of including more premium luxury in its lineup.” Of his time on the test track, the
Automobile
magazine writer said, “The Genesis is a willing partner as we try to keep a smooth line and generate as much speed as possible on the brief straightaways. The AWD system adds stability, and the new steering system is an upgrade. The car goes where it is directed.” Even
Car and Driver
, the tone setter for U.S. auto criticism and always tough to please, wrote: “Hyundai might not have the know-how to threaten the BMW 5-series just yet, but this new Genesis is precisely the kind of experience that moves the Koreans one step closer to their goal.”

Phew. We made it through the initial gauntlet. Had we received a raft of Hyundai-should-stick-to-making-Elantras reviews, it would have been calamitous. Instead, the critics liked the new Genesis. Some even thought it showed we were pulling off the great brand-elevation experiment. Truth is, it was only a first step. With this kind of aspiration, every next model that Hyundai churns out must be a significant improvement over its predeces
sor. Yet that is exactly the kind of challenge Hyundai is always setting for itself. No one had written that we’d made a car that would blow the doors off the Germans. But we hadn’t expected that. Our best hope was that the new Genesis would be taken seriously as a premium car and would be a worthy challenge to the world’s best cars. That, the initial reviews had confirmed. I had to admit, wryly, there was a tone of “almost, not quite” to some of the reviews. “Three years here in Korea and I’m still getting that,” I mused. But I quickly brushed that aside. Given the huge chasm we were hoping to ford in just one generational jump of a vehicle, for the first time in a couple weeks I felt like I could breathe. I hoped the engineers and product teams who had put years of their lives into the new Genesis felt the same way.

Now, I could turn my attention back to my family and our plan.

25

FINDING HOME

For the past four years of our lives, as soon as Rebekah was accepted into the Foreign Service, it felt like we had spent more time planning and coordinating the logistics of our lives than actually living them. Each State Department posting was a monthslong process of bid lists, uncertainty, false starts, lobbying, and maddening silences as we waited for a government bureaucracy to decide our fates. When we were separated, we spent hours scouring airline schedules and fees, trying to time ticket purchases to get the best price for the not-cheap transoceanic flights. Now here we went again, trying to execute our highest-degree-of-difficulty maneuver yet: a simultaneous escape from jobs in Seoul and Jakarta and a unified splashdown into two new jobs back in Washington. The job offer waiting for me in Washington would mean nothing if we couldn’t extract ourselves from our current roles in Asia.

Rebekah was optimistic she could get something called a
“compassionate curtailment” from the State Department. In the Foreign Service, a curtailment means you’re leaving your assigned posting before you’re supposed to. The compassionate curtailment allows officers to leave a post for any number of personal reasons: for example, a death or illness in the family, or a spousal separation, like we had. We had seen a couple of compassionate curtailments approved while we were in Korea, and they enabled families to get back together. If Rebekah got one, she would be free to apply for jobs—of which there usually were many—at State Department headquarters in Washington. Rebekah felt good about where things were headed.

Meanwhile, I found my Korean lawyer. I had only had good dealings with my bosses at Hyundai, and Human Resources had bent over backward for three years accommodating my unusual situation. But a contract is a contract, and you never know how counterparties will react. A Korean labor lawyer looked at my contract and told me he thought the chance was minimal but not nonexistent that Hyundai would try to hold me to the contract. I was not as confident as Rebekah about my transition out of my job.

At the same time, after my initial euphoria wore off, I had to wrestle with the nature of exactly what kind of job I’d be doing back in Washington. There are essentially two kinds of PR jobs: in-house and agency. In-house PR was what I had done at Hyundai. At Hyundai, I had been able to treat my job as I’d treated a news beat back at the
Post
: I dug in deep, got to know everything about it, tried to develop a mastery. That fit my personality. At an agency, two things are true: First, you have to bring in clients, which I’d never done before. Second, you have to work for multiple clients. One day it could be a white-hat client. The next day, maybe not. That troubled me.

Going into Hyundai, I knew I liked cars, and my mechanical
engineering degree helped me know how they worked. I knew that practically every new car these days is a pretty good, very safe car, leagues better in quality and safety than my dad’s Oldsmobile Delta 88s. The longer I worked at Hyundai, the better I got to know the quality and commitment of the people who worked there, the easier it got to do PR for the company.

At Hyundai, I’d been approached by plenty of PR agencies hoping to win business from us. I knew the tone of the pitches I received, ranging from earnest to unctuous to even desperate. We’d rebuffed most of them. Now I’d be the guy making the pitches. I had to determine if I had the stomach for that.

Helping matters was the fact that I’d be going to work for a former colleague and friend. BGR had a number of international clients, which appealed to me. Many were long-term clients, which told me the firm valued relationships. I thought I had a reasonable chance to bring in some Korean business eventually. And, bottom line, all the meetings and e-mails and hallway chatter and lunchtime conversations would be in
English
. That as much as anything else swung the balance.

In truth, the overwhelming desire to get the family back together made most of these concerns secondary, or at least a can I could kick down the road. Rebekah could not hold on much longer without support from her husband, and I could not hold on much longer being a stranger to Annabelle. When you have a family, you don’t always get to choose your dream job. You hope that you’re lucky enough to do a job that (a) provides for your family, (b) is legal, and (c) allows you to sleep at night.