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From his glass-enclosed office at Daesung Group headquarters atop a 14-story tower in downtown Seoul, Chairman Kim Young Hoon looks out on a brown brick building where Kim Young Dae, his eldest brother, also lays claim to leadership of the group.
It took 50 years for their father, Kim Soo Keun, to build a lowly charcoal-briquette company into a global energy concern. On his deathbed in early 2001, he wanted his companies to continue to work together and assigned a role for each son. (omitted)
"We have three heads, just like in Caesar's time," says Young Hoon, referring to the triumvirate that ruled the Roman Empire before Julius Caesar won his power struggle.
 | (omitted) "Divided, we can't take on the big projects," says Young Hoon. Young Dae declined to comment for this article.
Daesung's fate highlights a looming crisis in corporate Asia: aging chief executives with poorly thought out succession plans, or even none at all. Failure to plan properly for succession, and the disputes that can result, can do long-term damage to companies -- especially when deep-seated family tensions keep the wounds raw.
All over the world, chief executives cling to power and resist naming successors -- and the issue has bubbled to surface recently in the U.S. After years of being pressured to name a successor, Citigroup Inc. chief Sanford Weill, 70, appointed Charles Prince to replace him as CEO early next year. |
At AIG, the giant insurance company, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, 78, recently put in place a plan for corporate stewardship after his reign ends -- though there are no plans to detail the actual succession process unless he dies unexpectedly. Warren Buffett, 72, who heads investment behemoth Berkshire Hathaway, is making some investors nervous by his failure to publicly identify a successor.
The difference in Asia is the sheer number of elderly CEOs at the region's largest companies, many of which are family run. The generation of entrepreneurs that built Asia's business titans after World War II are now in their 70s and 80s. Most of them are still at the helm and plan to stay there until they die, as Mr. Kim did. Two-thirds of publicly traded companies in Asia are controlled by a single shareholder, very often the founder, compared with just 2% in the U.S., according to<
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