If there is a book where you can learn 40 years of wisdom in just 4 hours, I thought it was this book. This book is a book of 40 years of experience of the former head of the Korean branch of Seco Tools, a cutting tool company based in Sweden, and it is a book of life wisdom based on the Bible, Confucius’ teachings, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, etc. And this book resonated with me because it is a must-read book for any salesperson who wants to be a top performer. Because I had received B2B sales training at IBM Korea in the past, and I learned from the experiences of senior salespeople who were good performers, but this book went beyond that and included know-how on how to manage a sales team and branch management. It was like a life manual for me to look back on my career as a salesperson over the past 20 years and prepare for the next 20 years.

Starting with the introduction that it is the positive mindset that determines the future, the lessons on how to deal with customer representatives and how to accurately understand their needs and respond to them in the fastest way, how to provide value to customers by preparing at least five different application scenarios, and how to think about their problems as if they were your own by constantly thinking of innovative solutions, were like a direct address to me. The chapter on how to share sales know-how within the team and how people who have always sold cheap products find it difficult to sell expensive products also connected with the difficulties I feel these days in growing a team and how to propose solutions that are more expensive than competitors. And in the book ‘The Power of Words’ by Woongjin Group Chairman Yoon Seok-Keum, which I recently read, there were teachings that were in line with the know-how he used to sell the complete Encyclopedia Britannica at his first job in the early 70s for 270,000 won.

Even in Korea, it is very difficult to get a job in a foreign company, even in the past, and even if you manage to get a job, you have to communicate in English to communicate with the headquarters, and you have to overcome not only the language barrier but also the cultural barrier to manage other foreign employees. Therefore, it is very rare to become an executive of a global company rather than an executive of a large Korean company, and it is a legend that such a position has been held for decades. I’ve been both the head of an overseas branch of a Korean SME and the head of a Korean branch of a global company, and I realize that it’s hard to manage sales performance, team management, and risk management according to the economy every year.

’42 Years of Business Wisdom’ was a timely book for me as I was in a slump after managing the Korean branch for 5 years and it gave me the strength and wisdom to prepare for the next 20 years. If I always keep the contents of this book by my side and read it whenever I think of it, I believe that I can become the head of the Korean branch of a great global company like the author, and I woke up at 5 am to write a blog and start my day with energy.