One Monday morning in 1980, Deputy Manager Kim is preparing for the monthly sales performance meeting. He calculates the performance using his calculator, which was a gift for joining the company, and carefully draws up the monthly sales performance table on an OHP film using a ruler.

 Surely, this is an unfamiliar scene for those of us working at Amorepacific in 2019. As such, the way of working has changed little by little whether we have been aware of the changes or not. Our way of working is different from that of not only 30 years ago, but 5 or even one year ago. It is somewhat natural that the way we work has changed as our surrounding environment such as technology, the times of the era and trends continuously change. This column aims to briefly look at the way of work that were introduced by various companies and reflect on the way we work at Amorepacific.

 Following a quality issue regarding General Electric's products discovered during a quality satisfaction survey in 1995, then-CEO Jack Welch actively introduced Six Sigma as a way to resolve the issue. Six Sigma was a methodology to manage quality by defining the issues of the production process and making improvements by quantifying elements with the goal of achieving no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. GE became the standard for Six Sigma by achieving cost saving of more than $3 billion USD by reducing the defect rate in the production process through complying with the Six Sigma principles. Six Sigma was applied not only to production, but also to other various areas including marketing, sales and product development.

 If Six Sigma focused on 'improvement', TRIZ was a methodology that focused on 'inventive problem solving.' The TRIZ method analyzed 40,000 patents across the world and simplified the patterns of invention into 40 steps. P&G utilized these principles well in its business. The most well-known case of using the TRIZ method was the development of its teeth whitening product. Whitening products before required the consumer to apply the whitening product to a teeth mold and wear it for 8 hours. Long use of the product led to damaging the gums. P&G applied 'division' of the TRIZ principles and developed a transparent whitening strip by removing the teeth mold from the equation. This product was easy to use and did less harm to the gums, which made it a hit product and achieved cumulative sales of $1 billion USD by 2010.

 Aside from the abovementioned Six Sigma and TRIZ method, there are different ways of working being developed and applied in various areas, including ways focusing on 'execution' such as the Kaizen (improvement method), Just-in-time (JIT), growth hacking, 4DX, and agile, and ways focusing on 'creativity' and 'communication' such as design thinking, open innovation, townhall meeting, and all-hands meeting.

 Many leading companies are continuously seeking and introducing different methods according to the trend of times, nature of the company or related activities. For example, Samsung Electronics introduced Six Sigma in 1995, TRIZ in 2000, and design thinking in 2001, company-wide. It is also known that the company applied the agile methodology when developing Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge in 2016, attempting to make a change in its way of working once more.

 What we should focus on is not the companies' way of working itself but the fact that they constantly contemplate and try new ways of working in seeking the best method for themselves. Much like the shift from abacus to using excel became a very valuable attempt and opportunity, despite the challenges in those old days, our current attempts at changing the way we work will become the foundation for changes and innovation of Amorepacific in the future. That foundation is currently the three methods Amorepacific has introduced as a new way of working – 4DX, design thinking and townhall meeting. Our next column will take a deep dive into the three different methods.