Turnaround · South Korea · 1993–2012
Samsung's ‘New Management’: change everything but your wife and children
Chairman Lee Kun-hee declared that Samsung must change everything to compete on quality, famously had defective phones burned in front of staff, and turned Samsung into a global leader.
By Shivam Bhandari · Reviewed 31 October 2026 · How we write
by the numbers
- Frankfurt Declaration
- June 1993
- Devices burned (1995)
- around 150,000
- World's largest phone maker
- by 2012
What happened
In the early 1990s Samsung was a large but second-tier electronics maker known for cheap products. In June 1993 in Frankfurt, chairman Lee Kun-hee told executives to ‘change everything except your wife and children’, shifting focus from quantity to quality.
In 1995, after discovering many defective mobile phones had been given away as gifts, Lee ordered around 150,000 phones and other devices to be piled up and burned at a factory in front of employees. The message was clear. Samsung invested heavily in design, memory chips, and displays.
Samsung became the world's largest memory-chip maker and, by 2012, overtook Nokia as the world's biggest mobile phone maker by units.
Timeline
- 1993
Frankfurt ‘New Management’ declaration.
- 1995
Defective phones burned.
- 2010
First Galaxy S smartphone.
- 2012
Overtakes Nokia in phone units.
what made it work
- Leader-driven culture shift to quality.
- Dramatic symbolic action.
- Heavy investment in core components.
the lesson
A dramatic, symbolic act from the top can make a quality-first culture real for everyone in a large organisation.
Apply it to your business
- 1Make quality failures visible and unacceptable.
- 2Use symbolic moments to signal real change.
- 3Invest in the components that give you an edge.
Laws at work in this story
Figures are rounded and drawn from public reports, company filings and widely cited coverage at the time. Check the company's latest filings before relying on any number.