"I declare the Doosan Way to lead the Doosan Business Group, now at 116 years, for another 100 years,” Doosan Chairman Park Yong-man said. The message was contained in a recently released booklet on the business group’s management tenets he had been conceiving for eight years.
The palm-size 161-page booklet titled “The Doosan Way” was distributed to all Doosan executives and staff members in mid-October.
The book has attracted keen attention from both inside and outside the conglomerate as Chairman Park himself had scrutinized all things starting from publication planning. It is unusual for the chairman of a conglomerate to be involved in establishing its corporate culture and spreading it and educating all executives and staff members about it.
The book is divided into four chapters°™the Doosan Credo, the commentary of the Doosan Credo, the changed models of the Doosan Way, and the “Proud Doosan People’s Temperamental Characteristics.”
The Doosan Credo and its commentary take up a large portion of the book. The Doosan Credo unveils Doosan’s goals and nine core values: talented manpower, gifted manpower development, honesty & transparency, harmony, customer, technology & innovation, profits, social responsibilities, and safety and environment. The Doosan Credo calls for offering products and services that improve the quality of the lives of regional societies and people around the world and becoming a proud Doosan as a global innovative leader.
The Doosan Credo defines the goal for human development as “Our greatest assets for realizing our dreams,” based on the group’s motto “Humans are the future.”
The group has recently revamped its education on human development and its evaluation system. It attaches top priority to education designed to strengthen staff members’ capacity, so the way senior officials nurture junior officials’ capacity and potential is a key evaluation factor.
The Doosan Way is meant to guide the way its employees carry out their responsibilities. At a meeting with his executives and staff members, Chairman Park emphasized that they should perform their duties according to the Doosan Way.
The booklet caps Chairman Park’s eight-year bid to establish the group’s corporate culture. When he took the helm at the business group in April 2011, Chairman Park set the foremost tasks for 2012 as the declaration and proliferation of the Doosan Way. He noted that the Doosan Group has transformed a company of consumer products, such as beverages and liquors, into a company of infrastructure support businesses such as power generation, desalination, and construction equipment over 10 years, thus the group now needs to establish a new corporate culture.
‘Bobcat On a Roll’
“Bobcat, currently Doosan Infracore International, has risen to stardom within the Doosan Group,” Chairman Park said in a dinner marking the 10th anniversary of the Korea American Community Foundation (KACF) at the Manhattan Marriott Hotel in New York on Nov. 1.
He said Bobcat, a U.S. based subsidiary of Doosan Infracore, is expected to make a complete turnaround this year, as the company is forecast to post 300 billion won in operating profits.
The Doosan Group made headlines when it acquired Bobcat for $4.9 billion in November 2007, the biggest-ever overseas acquisition by a Korean company. Bobcat once experienced such hardships as the closure of a plant in the wake of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis that hit shortly after the acquisition, but things have now changed.
Park said the demand for large-sized equipment has shrunk in recession-hit emerging markets, including China, whereas the U.S. market with a rising demand for smaller equipment is recovering, thus leading to improved performances.
He said that the M&A is sure to have synergetic effects, adding that the group has balanced its construction equipment portfolios with Doosan Infracore, a large-sized equipment maker, and Bobcat, a maker of smaller construction equipment.
