WSJ

Ted Chung is a rarity among business executives in South Korea.

He doesn't care about how many people are reporting to him. He socializes with employees no matter what their job is in the company. He openly solicits and publicizes complaints about his company. And he doesn't drive around in a black car, standard issue for an executive of his stature. (His is blue.)

Mr. Chung since 2003 has been president and chief executive officer of Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital, the financial services companies that are part of the same business group as Hyundai Motor Co.

He led one of the most successful—and well-known—turnarounds in recent Korean corporate history. Facing a $900 million loss in 2003, Mr. Chung sold a 43% stake in both companies to GE Financial Services Co. and then adopted GE's risk-assessment practices. He pruned lower-profit customers and adopted sophisticated brand management techniques to re-shape the image of both firms.

To Korean customers, the change is most visible at Hyundai Card, which has gone from fourth-place to first in transaction value. With a blend of design, marketing and high-quality service, the company created an air of exclusivity and aspiration around its credit cards.

To make such changes, Mr. Chung attacked much of what's traditional about Korean corporate life, blowing up notions of lifetime employment and age-based seniority. He showed dozens of top executives the door and allowed employees to shape their own career path rather than being assigned jobs randomly, as is common in big Korean firms.

Mr. Chung, 50 years old, first engineered a radical corporate change when he was assigned to lead a factory in Mexico of another Hyundai Motor-related company, called Hyundai Mobis. "That was the most important stage of my business life," he says. Last year, Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital produced a net profit of $714 million. Mr. Chung, meanwhile, has become one of the most widely followed Korean executives on Twitter.

He spoke recently at his office in Seoul with Evan Ramstad. Some excerpts:

WSJ: What was your first job?
Mr. Chung: My very first job was at Norton Industrial Ceramics in Boston. It's a ceramics engineering company. They make ceramics for semiconductors and the Cobra or Apache helicopters. And they hired me as a business development manager to develop the Korean market. I did not do too much.

WSJ: What did you learn there?
Mr. Chung: Understand the company before you take a job. That company was a good company, but I couldn't understand all the chemical formulas, which I had never, ever heard of. It was kind of torture.

WSJ: How did that make a difference in terms of how you view career choices?
Mr. Chung: It was a very short but good experience to work inside a U.S. company. Maybe that does not represent all U.S. companies but at least I could see what kinds of mechanisms and human relationships existed in the company. And then, I moved to Hyundai.

WSJ: What did you see that was different about the mechanisms or the human relationships at a U.S. company compared to a giant Korean business group?
Mr. Chung: For example, at Hyundai, if you call in sick, they ask what's wrong and all of the doubting questions. At Norton, one time I said I was sick and I just went to New York to see my friends. And then, when I came back, I found like a hundred get-well cards in front of my door. It killed me. So, a good lesson: Don't lie.

WSJ: Do you have a kind of a philosophy about the workplace?
Mr. Chung: Actually, I am trying to create the very hardest working environment with only a few good people. I do not have too many executives or too many employees. So being very selective, getting hard-working people and then very high performance, and then very high treatment, and then nice working environment and the respect. Hard-working people create pressure and productivity, but they get compensation and privacy. Also, they need a break. So, unlike other [Korean] companies, we ask every executive to have at least two weeks of vacation and you don't have to make any report in advance. When it comes to business, we want people to get harder. When it comes to private things, we want to be much nicer. And employees need pride.

WSJ: What do you mean by pride?
Mr. Chung: Pride in their individual work. Pride in the company. Pride in the people they are working with.

WSJ: Can you connect how that work culture you have created has affected the results?
Mr. Chung: Some people just say it's about people for PR reasons, but I really mean it. This kind of working environment and flexible spirit can accommodate more talented people. I think every company should be this way. For example, we hire many people from many different backgrounds. But banks or other competitors tend to just hire people with only a financial background, which limits their imaginations. We have a very nice analyst and financial guys, but also, we have many different people. The whole picture is perfectly optimized to take a more imaginative or innovative approach to work.

WSJ: What book have you been reading lately?
Mr. Chung: Jim Collins' "How the Mighty Fall." Because we are not God, we will go down someday, temporarily or forever. But we want to stay in this growth mode a bit longer. Jim Collins educated me twice, how to go from good to great and how to keep your greatness one day longer.