Case Study: Woori’s OneDo Strategy to Become a Top Asian Bank

Much is now written on the rise of “brand South Korea,” but the country’s financial institutions are still lagging. Chairman and CEO Pal-Seung Lee of the Woori Financial Group wants to change that. “Woori must become one of the top 10 financial institutions in Asia over the next decade.” This is a place that no South Korean company has yet held.

In a new case study released by the Columbia’s Center on Global Brand Leadership, Professors Hun-Joon Park, Dong-il Jung and Bernd Schmitt explore how South Korea’s Woori Finance Holdings Co. developed a strategy to cut costs, increase customer service quality and empower employees throughout the organization. This resulted in increased revenue production and lower overhead costs, helping drive Chairman Lee’s goal for Woori to be one of Asia’s top 10 financial institutes.

Woori Finance Holdings Co., Ltd. was formed in April 2001 when Hanvit Bank merged with several other smaller banks. It was the first and largest holdings group in South Korea, Woori Finance Holdings immediately realized that a more customer-centric business mindset was needed, but at the same time, cost savings were critical to success. In 2009, the global financial crisis pushed these priorities to the forefront of Woori Finance Holdings’ concerns, and so OneDo was born.

What began as a strategic cost reduction program quickly evolved into a way of thinking that soon embedded itself into the culture of Woori. OneDo was conceived to build the Woori Group into a “Strong Organization through Low Cost and High Efficiency.” The name OneDo encapsulates everything the initiative stands for. “One” emphasizes that the organization is one family, and is striving to be the top player in the industry. “Do” conveys a proactive and creative attitude; employees are encouraged to take responsibility and take action.

OneDo was created with four main principles that have driven growth within the company over the last four years:

• Ask questions — Find waste in day-to-day operations
• Change perspectives — Find causes of problems through shifting paradigms
• Gather ideas — Collect wisdom to solve problems
• Eliminate waste — Remove non-value-added work

Read the full study (.pdf) to learn more about how Woori’s Chairman & CEO, Mr. Pal-Seung Lee, used OneDo to harness the energy of his employees to drive Woori’s evolution into a global player in the finance industry.

BY MATTHEW QUINT AND ALENA CHIANG

A Culture of Experimentation: More Innovation, Less Spend

In the world of marketing, there’s not always one right answer. Kaaren Hanson, Vice President of Design Innovation for Intuit, has applied this thinking to product development at Intuit.

At last month’s BRITE ’13 conference, Hanson discussed how rapid experimentation enhanced Intuit’s product innovation process enabling them to find better solutions, cut costs and drive employee engagement. The focus at Intuit is no longer weighted on finding the correct answer, as traditional thinking dictates. “Often you spend time in a room discussing and debating that answer… there are so many politics,” explains Hanson. Instead, the folks at Intuit have shifted focus to what Hanson describes as a culture of experimentation.

Hanson elaborates, “There are many right answers with so many different possible right answers… it behooves those teams to come up with potentially varied solutions. And then rapidly experiment.” In this phase, Intuit places trust in the customer before launching the product. “Let the customer decide, through their behaviors, what works and what doesn’t…. We build the users up before we make the decision to actually build it out. ”

Cycle time is much shorter and total spend is much lower, enabling them to reallocate those savings to product development. “Our hit rate… from the old way to the new way is not necessarily significantly different.” Because the process now takes less time and money, Intuit runs 50 different ideas in the same amount of time and resources it used to take to run three.

To truly benefit from rapid experimentation, Hanson emphasizes the following:

• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution: having several solutions will enable more objective judgment.
• Scrappy doesn’t mean crappy: rapid prototypes must not sacrifice quality.
• Get started: to see results, start small and work up to developing a culture of rapid experimentation across the entire organization.

Watch Hanson’s talk at BRITE ’13 to learn more about Intuit’s implementation of rapid experimentation.

BY ALENA CHIANG AND ALLIE ABODEELY