While I have been confused and annoyed at AMCHAM over my tenure in Korea, rarely does the organization or outgoing Prez. Tami Overby done anything to outright anger me. A caption of her in a photo of her good-bye press conference however got me riled up this morning:
Amcham President Tami Overby points out that there is a misunderstanding about the real Korea outside the country due to aggressive and striking pictures that decorate the front pages of the foreign press
Or in other words: Tami has one last drink of the Kool-aid, by choice or out of respect, before she leaves the party.
As some of you know the alleged global conspiracy of the foreign press has been a constant source of amusement for me over the years. My favorite was at the height of the crash last year the Blue House initiating a witch-hunt for the Financial Times’s reporting of “inaccuracies” while ignoring the flood of similar “inaccuracies” in the local press. In a related way, there is the whole “Korean Brand” question. The idea that Korea does not have problems that need to be addressed, but a advertising and PR gap. Again, I am not too sure Korea’s brand is undervalued given the tomfoolery in the English press alone. Just a few weeks ago there was the labor market economist saying the foreigners have the wrong idea and the labor market is changing, oblivious to every story of labor strife found in Korea over just the few weeks previous.
I can only hope the incoming AMCHAM Prez. will BYOB to this party.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Can someone please tell me how she got a job outside Korea?
Peter Principle in action
In all fairness to Tami she did a great job in organizing, networking, and always seemed gung-ho to help out in specific things.
Never did like the passive role they took in lobbying during the FTA negotiation, and disliked the cheerleading on the negotiated FTA. However one could say it was improper to comment on a working process, and she then did her best to make a purse from a sow’s ear.
The caption is a paraphrase and not an actual quote. The English in the caption is unnatural and sounds like a Korean reporter’s liberal interpretation of Tami’s remarks.
Unfortunately, the things Tami was gung-ho about were basically limited to organizing the prom committee and an annual picnic. Those are great, but social functions aren’t the reason that I — or, I believe, most of the membership — joined AMCHAM. Under her watch, the knowledge-generation and -dissemination function of AMCHAM died, and as Dram noted, the organization’s lobbying function got co-opted by the wrong interest group.
Unfortunately, the sow’s ear was Tami herself. AMCHAM sucks because of her (unless you didn’t go to your senior prom), and it will take some time to get the organization fixed.
Right, as Brendon said, organizing the big ticket circuses to reward and keep the multinational interests she courted diverted from the strategies, tactics and substantive policies inimical to US business interests generally that she inherited and continued from the regime of her bureaucratic padrone, the Fat Man. Together, they effectively killed the organization as a force for the promotion of US business interests; imo, it’s very unlikely to do a Lazarus; it will just continue as a means of influence-peddling, Korean-style, for those with the dosh and inclination to play that game – that’s what they made it, a waeguk guanxi machine – the commercial equivalent of an Itaewon white man’s room salon.
My main impression of Tami was how she’d blatantly snub me at events, despite our knowing each other many years — quite obviously i’m not an American with the money or clout that’d make me worth greeting…
Pre-Tami, the Chamber’s President was always the CEO of an American company, no? It rotated a lot, I assume because the CEOs were too busy to devote much time to being Chamber president. Tami was the head of the bureaucracy that ran the Chamber under a series of Presidents. I further assume that her ascension to the Presidency happened because the available CEOs agreed among themselves that it wasn’t worth it for them to keep taking the post, and Tami was running the Chamber anyway, so….
The thing about bureaucracies is that they always seem to end up existing mainly for their own sake, their original purpose and external clients being forgotten or made symbolic. Amcham’s new president will have to discover whether the organization is even capable of fulfilling a role as a business lobby here, which partly depends on the availability of effective Korean organizations to interact with, and the possibility of exerting any influence over them. If no such role is available, or if the possible rewards are dwarfed by the effort it takes to achieve them, then it’s back to organizing parties. It will indeed take some time to figure this out.
i’m just happy and amazed to see that no one mentioned her picture for a total of eight responses. congratulations everyone! you’re not as shallow as i am!
#1: She probably lobbied for that position for several years in DC. You know, the annual doorknock pilgrimage.
Someone brought to my attention what the Egypt Amcham is doing and it is a model Amcham–useful meetings out the wazoo, publications that will really help people do business there, half of its revenue internally generated by advisory services, etc. etc. The one here is a complete joke in comparison. We shall see who they appoint in her stead.
Well, the bad news is that Steve McKinney has been judged “not experienced enough” to fill Tami’s role. Steve’s been a country manager of a multinational corporation in a manufacturing sector, an entrepreneur with his own small company, a Governor of AMCHAM, President of his church, and did fine work with the Foreign Schools Foundation. But he doesn’t have “international trade experience” like Tami. Nevermind that she didn’t either, until she was hired on at AMCHAM.
Steve was very interested in benchmarking the good AMCHAMs like the Egypt one, and revitalizing the organization’s informational-resource role to help medium-sized and smaller companies get established in Korea. Of course, with an agenda like that he cannot be invited to interview. My guess is we will get Amy Jackson of Crowell & Moring — she who led the spectacularly successful (from the Korean perspective) FTA talks — shoved down our throats. Viva la prom!
Maybe that’s not fair to Ms. Jackson, since I don’t know her. Of course, the reason I don’t know her is that Ms. Jackson has not been living and working in Korea. She appears to be much smarter than Tami. But her background is not as a Koreanist (she studied Japanese and lived in Japan); in fact, the only discernable connection to Korea that Amy Jackson has is that she was leader of the US trade team that got worked over by the Koreans in the KORUS FTA negotiations. I’m not so sure that’s a big plus, except in the case the AMCHAM intends to continue its recent role as mouthpiece in Washington for Korean business interests.
Here’s the money quote from the Joonang article:
Eh? Yeah, you read that correctly. “Korea”. Who woulda thought that Job 1 for the President of Amcham was the promotion of Korean business interests? She didn’t just drink the kool-aid or catch a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome; she took the full course of Dr. Frankenhwang injections.
“gun-ho”
isn’t that the term for a girlfriend of a rapper carrying a deadly weapon
Don’t you think, Sperwer, that when she is speaking like that, she is not promoting Korean business interests but promoting American business interests by selling the FTA to the Korean counterparts who are not yet convinced? i.e. doing her job?
No, because I don’t think the proposed FTA, as it currently stands, IS in the interests of US business (as opposed to a very small number of specific US businesses already in Korea who themselves will, imo, only marginally (but still profitably) benefit) because of the perpetuation of comparatively disproportionately favorable treatment for Korean businesses vis-a-vis the US.
Besides, if you reread the cited passage, it explicitly describes her agenda as convincing US legislators to vote in this terrible deal. Of course, one could argue that’s her new agenda; but anyone who’s followed her machinations at Amcham (and those of her predecessor and patron, the Fat Man) knows it’s been their lodestar for years. They are commercial Benedict Arnolds.
Amen to that, brother.
I met her a few years ago while teaching a seminar for IFANS and thought she was nothing but an apologist for Korea. She didnt seem to see the American side of issues or seem to push them with the locals.
I heard Tom Coyner was interested in the position. Did he get the brush off?
#9 “She’s a man, baby!”
Who cares what she say’s on the way out of town. Sentimentalism counts for crap.
Every encounter I had with her over the years was negative.
Being a dues-paying member of AMCHAM is like playing a game of poker: If you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.
More people agree with that assessment than you might think. My Spring 2009 AMCHAM Directory arrived today, and upon seeing it, I sense that whoever walks into that organization is taking charge of a sinking ship. There are 1330 members of AMCHAM listed in the directory, as against 1876 members in the Spring 2006 directory.
There’s actually been a pretty clear trend of declining membership as the organization has become less and less relevant: 2045 members in Fall 2006, 1880 members in Fall 2007, 1574 members in Fall 2008, and now 1330 six months later.
AMCHAM has shed 1/3 of its membership from Fall 2006 to now. Assuming each of those 700 members gone walkabout was paying W400,000 in dues, that’s a loss of W280 million in revenue just from membership. No wonder AMCHAM is so reliant on those unpaid interns.
The members voting with their feet is a clear indictment of the Overby prom organizing committee approach.
Nice work counsellor! I wonder how that stellar record factored into the decision by AMCHAM central to bring Overby to DC – probably not, insofar as they seem as bedazzled by the need to act as the promoter of Korea and free, unequally reciprocated Korean access to US markets, as Overby, regardless of the interests of the constituency that they purportedly represent
The directory was so noticeably thinner that my curiosity got the better of me. Thinner paper stock? Different design putting more listings per page? I wondered. Then it hit me — the physical parameters are the same, but AMCHAM sucks more and more.
Did these people in DC do no due diligence? I know if I were hiring someone who was CEO of a membership-based organization, I’d ask her how the membership numbers were trending and what she thought were the reasons for the direction the organization was going.
BTW, what happened to my free lunch? I’m getting ready for another lifting cycle and need to pump up the glycogen stores, since I’m going to do this one with an absolute minimum of carbs for the duration.
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