Philippa Kaur

Lee kun-hee embarked on a world tour in 1993 to take stock of Samsung, the firm he inherited from his father. Finding its televisions and other electronics languishing on shelves, he decided to remake Samsung’s image. “Change everything but your wife and your children,” he told employees. One thing that didn’t change, according to a ruling by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (icsid), is the close relationship between such chaebol, family-run conglomerates that form the backbone of South Korea’s economy, and the government.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

American technology barons occasionally bemoan the lack in the West of “super-apps”, multifaceted online platforms offering a variety of different services. But the global interest in the business model belies the difficulties facing existing super-apps in Asia.Their recent performance has disappointed (see chart). Collectively, the market capitalisation of Singapore’s Sea and Grab, South Korea’s Coupang and Kakao, Japan’s Rakuten, and the parent company of India’s Paytm has declined by around 60% since the end of 2021. None of the firms is the same; they each make money from a blend of mobile gaming, social media, e-commerce, ride-sharing and financial payments. What they have in common is an aspiration to bundle together a variety of services which complement one another on one app. They had hoped hoping to emulate Chinese companies, such as Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay, which pioneered the business model.But the newer Asian super-apps have been put under huge pressure by a rapidly changing environment. Funding, which was once cheap and plentiful, has dried up, making ambitious growth plans harder to finance. James Lloyd at Citigroup, a bank, notes that China’s super-apps started with a core of profitable and engaging businesses (e-commerce for Alipay and social media in the case of WeChat), which other services were built around. Outside China, few firms have balanced both significant scale and earnings in a similar way.Kakao, a South Korean firm, most closely fits the bill. Unlike most Asian would-be super-apps, it has been reliably profitable. Yet its share price has declined by 8% this year. Because the company is dominant on its home turf, it is running out of room for further domestic growth. Its ride-hailing arm has a market share in South Korea of as much as 90%, by some estimates. The firm wants to raise the international share of its revenues from 10% today to 30% by 2025—but such global expansion comes at a cost. At other firms the funding squeeze has inspired ambitions for profitability, which inevitably comes at the expense of previous plans for rapid expansion. GoTo, an Indonesian super-app, created from the merger of Gojek, a ride-hailing company, and Tokopedia, an e-commerce firm, was expected to appoint a former banker, Patrick Walujo, as CEO at its shareholder meeting on June 30th, after we published this. Mr Walujo has stressed that his aim is to make the company profitable.One Asian consumer-tech firm has bucked this year’s trend. The share price of Paytm, a would-be Indian super-app based around digital payments, has rallied by around 60%. The stock is still less than half of its all-time high, reached shortly after it floated in November 2021, and the firm has yet to make a profit. Nonetheless, its rising share price may reflect something companies elsewhere in Asia lack: a single, large and growing domestic market to work with. Whether that potential for scale proves enough for a more sustainable future for Paytm has yet to be seen. The idea of a company using a single platform to offer a variety of services to consumers has an intuitive appeal. But after more than a decade of discussion about the coming dominance of super-apps, many of the Asian firms are still struggling to find a balance between size and profitability. With no end in sight to higher funding costs, a speedy recovery for these one-time darlings of tech investors is hard to foresee. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

In a summer crowded with blockbusters, Disney may sweat to recoup the $295m it reportedly spent making “Dial of Destiny”, the fifth and final Indiana Jones film, out on June 30th in America. But the movie is already a hit for a firm in another industry. Herbert Johnson, a 134-year-old London hatmaker, is fielding soaring demand for a certain fedora.“It’s been just glorious,” says Michelle Poyer-Sleeman, the master hatter who designed the latest iteration of the Poet, the hat first donned by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1981. The firm had to keep the product under its hat until a couple of weeks before the movie’s launch. But already the “Destiny Poet” has caused a seven-fold rise in Herbert Johnson’s revenue since June last year. A backlog of over 300 orders waits to be handmade in a workshop that hums with the sound of fans, steam and irons.The boom marks a sharp turnaround for the firm. After the success of “Raiders” it provided Indy’s hats in the follow-ups, “Temple of Doom” (1984) and “Last Crusade” (1989). But a downturn in hat-wearing brought hard times. Venerable hatters such as Italy’s Borsalino went bust. Herbert Johnson was sold and for a while stopped making its hats in-house. For “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, Indy’s fourth adventure, in 2008, the producers went elsewhere.After a rethink in 2016 the firm went back to handmaking and focused on the Poet, which today accounts for three-quarters of sales. The internet brought new customers, many of them American (and many women). Customers wait up to six months for their £495 ($630) rabbit-felt Poet, which comes with an optional “Raiders turn”, a 25-degree twist of the crown to match the jaunty angle at which Mr Ford wore his (supposedly to keep it on during stunts). The firm advises keeping it out of heavy rain and heat and to brush it only anticlockwise. Dr Jones would surely scoff.Swaine, the 273-year-old luxury-goods firm that owns Herbert Johnson, hopes for success with other on-screen products. It sells a £520 umbrella of the sort twirled by Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain” and a £3,200 attaché case used by James Bond in “From Russia with Love” (minus the concealed knife). In March it opened a new flagship shop. Hat-wearing is making a comeback, says Ms Poyer-Sleeman, who spotted several clients at the “Dial of Destiny” premiere. There is also a “swing back to quality”, she says. People want something that will last, “and we’re in that niche.”■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Rules to police investment by American firms in China have acquired a phantom quality: always imminent, always delayed. In recent months the steady beat of debate on the topic has quickened to a drumroll. In March America’s Treasury and Commerce Departments delivered reports on potential rules. The next month Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s security adviser, trailed the policy in a speech. An executive order from Mr Biden is expected to follow. America’s allies are mulling similar restrictions. On June 20th the European Commission announced plans, albeit vague ones, to propose an initiative by the end of the year.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Traditions abound at the annual airshow that rotates between Paris and Farnborough. One is visitors’ observation that a glittering capital city, with the Eiffel Tower visible through the haze at the end of the runway, is preferable to a British town so unremarkable that its main attraction is its biennial airshow. Another is complaints about the heat from those trudging airstrips covered in commercial jets, fighter planes, helicopters and other pieces of high-tech kit.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

IN EARLY 2020 Swedish battery-makers noticed something alarming. Their Chinese suppliers were no longer able to sell them graphite, a mineral crucial to the production of lithium-ion cells. The Swedes assumed the problem would pass. Yet three years on, as Chinese investments in the battery industry have surged in Europe, Swedish firms are still largely cut off. In 2020 China’s exports to Sweden of two types of graphite nearly disappeared. In 2021 and 2022 they vanished completely.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

The three-martini lunch may be over, but the business dinner is here to stay—and it is a prospect that fills some executives with horror. For those who find the multiple rows of cutlery and wine glasses baffling, or who keep forgetting which side-plate is theirs, help is on hand to decode the hidden rules of etiquette. On the hills overlooking Lake Geneva, a company offers executives an extra layer of social polish to boost their confidence—and, perhaps, their career.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Too many management books rest on a vague idea that has been stretched to breaking point. You can tell from the depth of the margins just how hard an author has had to work to draw the thesis out. Their covers are bright and zingy. Their titles either contain action-packed words like “strive” and “ignite” or give birth to some ghastly new portmanteau like “stressilience” or “charismility”. They are determined to take lessons for bosses from anywhere but an actual business: termites, hunter-gatherers, Novak Djokovic, salad dressing. The unspoken rule of most management titles, it seems, is to avoid the actual practice of management. What a relief, then, to read a book that breaks the mould. It lands with an intimidating thud. It looks and feels like a textbook. It is full of exercises and templates. And it is unapologetically practical in its focus. “Scaling People” is written by Claire Hughes Johnson, a tech-industry veteran who spent more than a decade at Google before joining Stripe, a digital-payments unicorn, as its chief operating officer in 2014. By the time she left that role in 2021, the firm had gone from 160 employees to over 7,000. In a world of coders, creators and visionaries, her work was to make things work. Much of the book is a manual for creating what Ms Hughes Johnson calls an operating system—the set of documents, metrics and processes that produces a consistent framework for making decisions and improving performance. There is a section on planning, with advice on setting good goals and deciding on the cadence of meetings and reviews that sets the right drumbeat for a company. There is another on hiring people, from building a recruitment pipeline to the interview process and the task of bringing new employees on board. There are chapters on improving team performance and on giving feedback. “Scaling People” is a product of Silicon Valley. It grapples with the problems of very fast growth; its context is one of founders, developers and product teams. For incumbents in highly regulated industries or employees in public-sector bureaucracies, the problems of scaling up may seem very remote. Stripe’s early decision to run a programming competition called “Capture the Flag”, for instance, helped build its reputation as a place for talented developers to go to. Established firms need to work less hard to create awareness among potential candidates but may have a tougher time building a name for innovation. But the insights on which such practices are founded—in this instance, getting candidates to do actual work as part of an application process and filling a hiring pipeline rather than waiting for jobs to open up—are transferable. And most of the book is devoted to problems that bedevil all industries and companies. Among other things, Ms Hughes Johnson gives tips on how to run an effective meeting; these include having a round of “check-ins” at the start (getting everyone to say what they want from the meeting, for instance) so that people are focused and so that the quietest members of the group participate early. She offers advice on how to do performance reviews, which decisions you can and should delegate to other people, and how to save high-performing employees from burnout. It is all refreshingly pragmatic. Behind the tactics lies a clear philosophy, which is to make the implicit explicit. That means being clear about how specific decisions are going to get taken: is this a consensual process or an autocratic one? It means writing things down: by articulating Stripe’s culture, the startup can be clear to prospective joiners what the company’s norms are. It means saying things that other people are not saying, especially if those things are causing dysfunction. It also means being aware of your own behaviour and preferences. Ms Hughes Johnson has long kept a “Working with Claire” document that spells out to new members of her team what they can expect: how she likes to take decisions, how quickly she will respond to messages, what she wants from them in a one-to-one meeting. Her advice will not suit everyone. There will be too much emphasis on process for some corporate cultures. But there is something thought-provoking for every boss. Your bedside table may groan with books on what Mr Djokovic can teach you about leadership or the lessons to be learned from mayonnaise. This book is trying to do something far more original and useful: turn you into a better manager.■Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:The upside of workplace jargon (Jun 15th)Why employee loyalty can be overrated (Jun 8th)How to beat desk rage (Jun 1st)Also: How the Bartleby column got its name More