Asian Post-Crisis Management: Corporate and Governmental Strategies for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

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A decade ago, a writer from Fortune magazine wrote in the preface to Kim Woo Chong's book, Every Street is Paved with Gold, that Kim, the Daewoo empire's founder, "personifies the drive and imagination that makes East Asia a dynamic center of economic growth." Kim fled South Korea in late 1999, shortly after his empire crashed.

From his initial exile post in Frankfurt, he submitted his resignation from all the Daewoo group's companies. He has left no clue about his whereabouts since then.Kim Woo Chong's meteoric rise as one of Asia's most powerful tycoons, and his equally spectacular fall, symbolize the Asian miracle and the prolonged crisis that threatended to destroy it in 1997 and that still hangs over the economic landscape.

The system's flaws became apparent in mid-1999, when Kim acknowledged that his companies, which had acquired a global reach in a debt-fueled expansion binge, could not pay their creditors. By the time the banks that took over the Daewoo group had calculated $80 billion in liabilities, Kim was changing addresses in Europe.

For Asia, lessons from the crisis indicate that traditional methods of operation through debt financing and over-investing will fail. This lesson and others are explored in Asian Post-Crisis Management. Contributers: Usha C.V. Haley • Masaaki Kotabe & Shruti Gupta • Yasuhiro Arikawa & Hideaki Miyajima • George T.

Haley • Brij N. Kumar, Yunshi Mao & Susanne Birgit Ensslinger • Nancy E. Landrum & David M. Boje • Xue Li, John Kidd, & Frank-J¼rgen Richter • Malcolm Cooper • Yi Feng & Baizhu Chen • Howard V. Perlmutter • Sek Hong Ng & Malcolm Warner • Thomas Clarke • Keun Lee • Caroline Benton & Yoshiya Teramoto • Fred Robins • Michael A.

Santoro & Chang-su Kim • Beverly Kitching • Hock-Beng Cheah & Melanie Cheah