Field Note 06 of 22

Seoul, South Korea

“You cannot reform a system using only minds formed within it.”

He had just retired as president of Korea's most influential economic institution. We sat across from each other, and I asked him to explain his country's transformation.

One thread ran through everything he said. Since the institution's founding in 1971, it had made a single conviction non-negotiable: recruit from abroad, measure against global standards, never let the institution become a mirror of the system it was built to improve.

He didn't describe this as a clever policy choice. He described it as something closer to a discipline — a founding decision the institution had simply never been allowed to drift away from, for over fifty years.

Field Note 06