ABSTRACT
For most of its history, Korea has been regarded by Westerners as a mostly irrelevant North-East Asian backwater on the global political and economic landscape. After 1945, the country was in the headlines as the place where a devastating war was fought. This war involved not only the two Korean states, but also the US and other Western powers, which backed the South, and communist China, which backed the North. Observers also took notice of the country’s sorry state of economic development and the bitter poverty under which its population had to live. What went unnoticed for many years was the deep transformation from a feudal agricultural to a modern industrial society that has been ongoing in Korea since the early twentieth century. What few people realized also was the dramatic growth and success of Korean companies. Korean entrepreneurs, eventually being allowed to make full use of their talents in a market economy, converted a war-torn country with little infrastructure into an industrial powerhouse within just a few decades. They employed managerial methods and strategies previously unheard of. Unnoticed by the world, Tiger Management was born.
