Chung Ju Yung

Chung Ju Yung, founder of South Korea’s Hyundai group of companies, proved a lot of people wrong. In the 1960s, he built Korea’s first cross-country expressway, which the World Bank said wasn’t economically viable. He exported the first Korean-made car to the U.S. while the industry laughed. He built Korea’s first oil tanker, though competitors scoffed. But Chung prevailed. One of Asia’s great industrialists, he played a leading role in lifting South Korea from a poverty-stricken mess to the world’s 11th largest economy. The companies he created include the world’s biggest shipbuilder, one of its hottest carmakers and one of its leading computer-chip makers. “Don’t you know,” Chung asked a skeptical financier in the early 1970s, “that the person who thinks a job is possible is the one who is going to get it done?”

Chung, who died in 2001, was proud of his rise from a rice-farming family to corporate chieftain. During construction of Hyundai’s first oil tanker, he’d rally workers through 15-hour days with heady promises, saying: “You’ll have a TV and a refrigerator in five years and a car in 15.” But his success was also due to his close ties with Park Chung Hee, Korea’s nation-building dictator. As Chung got older, he became imperious and his relentless determination to expand Hyundai proved its undoing. Buried under debt and wracked by scandal, the group was broken up in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Yet even after this reversal, the scale of Chung’s achievement remains undeniable. He raised the hopes of a nation ravaged by war and poverty, and embodied its drive. “Conviction creates indomitable efforts,” he once wrote. “This is the key to miracles.”