Jimwoong

Case analysis: Jimwoong

Many people dream to be entrepreneurs nowadays. Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business, i.e. a startup company offering a product, process or service. The entrepreneur is a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. The challenging but interesting start-up works attract people to continue. However, some unexpected crisis might happen on the way we go. Amount the crisis, it is believe that economic crisis is the most hurt to the entrepreneurs, especially those involved stock exchange. In this case analysis, the main character, Jinwoong, acted as a role that a typical entrepreneurship would face.

Jinwoong, a typical entrepreneurial firm, founded by T.P. Lee (named Lee below), which he had started almost 20 years earlier and built into the largest tent manufacturer in the world, experienced both flourish and fading. Lee graduated from Yonsei University, one of Korea’s best universities. This proved that he might be a well-skilled and well-prepared person. He joined a Korean general trading company called Samhwa International, but resigned 1 year later. He did not enjoy life at a big Korean company as a typical salaryman. This is what most teenagers thought, not only in Korea, but also Hong Kong, or even though the whole world.

Then, Lee and his wife opened a small leather handbag shop in a busy shopping district in Seoul, but it promptly failed. So he decided to venture out his own as a general trading company working with contract manufacturers. At 31 years of age, he established Jinwoong in March 1979 in Seoul. He won orders to supply backpacks, handbags, and tents to Korean trading companies. His main goal was to penetrate the US market – the largest market in the world. This might be an impossible goal for just a small entrepreneurship to do so. However, according to the extended Maslow hierarchy of need, people are not just implementing self-actualization. There is a level above it called self-surmount. Making impossible things to be possible is the general concept of this level. Lee was setting this goal to motivate his employees and himself to surmount themselves and ensure all of them were going towards the company goal.

Although Jinwoong risked bankruptcy and in turn losing $3 million, Lee did not give up with his business and treated those $3 million as an investment to build customer trust and Jinwoong’s reputation. This also reflected the self-surmount concept of the extended Maslow hierarchy of need. Lee’s painstaking effort had not been wasted. Jinwoong quickly rebounded the following year when it won a lucrative $6 million order to make the popular Cabbage Patch children’s bed tent for the US market.

But except for the company goal, how can Lee ensure his wife and his employees were going towards the goal? At a simple level, it seems obvious that people do things in order to get stuff they want and to avoid stuff they don't want. Overall, the basic perspective on motivation is that needs implies behavior, behavior implies satisfaction and satisfaction implies needs. In other words, you have certain needs or wants, and this causes you to do certain things, which satisfy those needs, and this can then change which needs or wants are primary. People seem to have different wants. This is fortunate because in markets this creates the very desirable situation. But it also means Lee need to try to get a handle on the whole variety of needs and who has them in order to begin to understand how to design organizations that maximize productivity.