Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan by Frank Ahrens Page A

e-mail me back, but not out of rudeness. First of all, it was highly uncommon for an executive to e-mail anyone below him but his Team Leader; further, e-mailing from higher rank to lower rank or from team to team can almost be seen as subversive.
    Let’s say that I, as a director, wanted some information that I knew an assistant manager on another team had. Instead of my e-mailing them directly, it was proper form for me to tell one of the assistant managers on my team—or, better, tell my team leader to tell one of my assistant managers—to contact the assistant manager on the other team to get the information and relay it to me.
    A few times, I e-mailed juniors on other teams and they answered, but typically to tell me that my e-mail made them uncomfortable because they were afraid their team leader would ask why they were exchanging e-mails with an executive on another team and would I please stop?
    I was eventually able to master Korean e-mail style. I never mastered lunch.
    Lunch at Hyundai headquarters is exactly—exactly—from noon to one p.m. Several thousand Hyundai, Kia, and affiliate workers in the two towers rush to the massive cafeteria to form long lines to get trays and pick one of a few choices of Korean food for lunch.
    Toward the end of my time at Hyundai, the lunch choice got a little more diversified and a Western counter was added to the cafeteria, where, if you were among the first couple hundred employees in that line, you could get a hamburger and a soda with no ice in a small cup from a fountain. This choice proved so popular that employees packed the hallway outside the cafeteria door nearest the Western stand and shoved, chest to back, like they were trying to board a Tokyo subway to get in at 12:01 when the doors opened and claim their burgers. I once asked a colleague why Hyundai didn’t stagger lunch hour to ease the crush: for example, odd-numbered floors could eat from 11:30 to 12:30, even-numbered floors from noon to 1:00. He believed the idea that lunch is at noon is so ingrained in the Korean business brain there was no changing it. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for lunch.
    Staff-level employees ate in the big cafeteria. The handful ofnon-Koreans at headquarters—about seven of us—could eat in the “foreigner’s café,” a small room with a few tables and a limited daily menu of what the Koreans thought Westerners would like to eat. This was a good effort by Human Resources, but imagine an American short-order cook trying to prepare quality Korean food.
    I ate with my team the first couple days in the big cafeteria, making a go of trying Korean food. Then they told me I could—probably should—eat in the executive cafeteria. There, we sat at tables with white tablecloths and were served by waitresses. Typically, a senior executive and his top junior executives would all walk to the executive cafeteria right at noon and sit at the same table each day. Per Confucian custom, the waitress would serve the table’s senior executive first, then everyone else after. Everyone would be done eating by 12:30 easily, but would wait if the senior executive was not finished. When he finished, he rose, everyone else at the table rose, and they all left.
    I ate several times with my boss and his other junior executives, and they certainly tried to be hospitable, but the problem was language. If I was at the table, they felt compelled to speak English, and their English did not lend itself to the long, wandering conversations I was used to at the Post . There was a lot of this:
    Boss: “I’m going to Brazil.”
    Me, hopeful that an English conversation was about to commence: “Oh, really? Why?”
    Boss (pausing): “To check the situation.”
    Me (realizing that was the end of the conversation): “I see.”
    Eventually, everyone at the table would lapse back into Korean and I’d be left out. I didn’t blame them. I was the obstacle to conversation at the table and I