Prologue: Engineering Students Leave the Lab and Join the Business World
Gratitude in a book

Entering the powerful force that governs our daily lives, business administration

Chapter 1: Why Prices for the Same Airline Tickets Vary So Widely
The inside story of airfares that you may not know even though you know it
Why a book that costs 100,000 won in the US costs 30,000 won in Korea
The Secret to Amazon.com's Sales
Why Buying Your Flight Tickets Early Is Cheaper
A sales strategy that even Kim Seon-dal would admire
Reserve rooms for premium customers

Chapter 2: A Great Sommelier Is Not a Liquor Shop
Why do you ask for my annual salary when I'm getting a rewards card?
Digging for Marketing Strategies in a Goldmine of Information
Companies already know what you want.

Chapter 3: Find the Red Balloon
Selfish choices benefit the world.
How could Google make a prediction that even the government couldn't?
How does collective intelligence create business models?
Why the US Department of Defense Played Balloons

Chapter 4: How do casinos and insurance companies make money?
Uncertainty, Challenging the Realm of the Gods
How casinos and insurance companies make money
MIT math genius' casino heist
The Airbus A380 that turned the airport into a mess

Chapter 5: Jazz Pianist Revolutionizes Samsung Semiconductors
The Secret of 10 Tables, 300 People
Samsung Electronics, the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. government
Mathematicians study queuing?
Why Bears Shouldn't Go on a Diet

Chapter 6: T-shirts that sold like hotcakes during the World Cup
Fake T-shirts sold even better than the real ones
Supply Chain Revolution

Chapter 7: Management Meets Science
Modern management thrives on the battlefield.
A genius graduate student solves a difficult business problem.
Are there Nobel Prize winners in economics from socialist countries?

Chapter 8: Spaceships into Management
Business Intelligence: The Brain of 21st Century Enterprises
When creating a fund, be prepared for panic, fear, and greed?

Epilogue: Modern Management is a Science

Should I stay in economics or move on to business administration?
―Business administration, which governs daily life and moves the world, becomes an essential liberal arts subject for the 21st century!

Why do they ask about my annual salary when I'm getting a loyalty card? Why do the same seats on the same flight cost so much? Why do I feel the urge to spend money every time I surf the web? Why did Google, the internet search engine, jump into the mobile phone business? And why did Microsoft become nervous about Google's entry into the mobile phone business? What was the secret behind Samsung Electronics' rise from last place in productivity in the Berkeley Report to first place in its industry?
Modern people often encounter situations like this in their daily lives where they know something but don't know what to do.
However, it is difficult to find a person or book that can completely resolve these questions.
There are some general economics books that claim to explain 'how the world works'.
But that alone is not enough to live wisely in this complex and unpredictable reality.
This is because, although we know 'how incentives work', we cannot tell 'how to provide incentives', that is, who 'moves the world' and by what principle.

So what can truly explain this seemingly complex phenomenon, including its causes? It's "management," a field that, combined with cutting-edge science, wields incredible power to completely dominate the daily lives of modern people.
For this reason, business administration is emerging as an essential subject that modern people living in the 21st century must understand.
This phenomenon is well illustrated by the MBA craze among working people.
The new book, "Business Administration Concert," was published at a time when we need to expand our horizons beyond economics to include business administration.


A modern management story more interesting than Freakonomics and more colorful than The Economics Concert.

The author, in publishing his new book, “Management Concert,” stated his ambition: “By introducing exciting cases, I hope to get one step closer to a new management paradigm.”
And, “The reason why I titled this book ‘Management Concert’ is because… the purpose of this book is to introduce various topics of modern management in an interesting and diverse way, like a concert that is fun to enjoy and a concert where various harmonies come together to convey a single theme.”
In fact, this book covers a wide range of topics in modern management with an interesting and diverse range of topics that surpasses Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics and Tim Harford's The Economics in Concert, which brought economics off the academic desks and turned it into a modern-day liberal arts subject in the mid-2000s.
From pricing issues like whether to charge fixed or variable airfares, to marketing issues like which customers should receive which advertisements at what time to maximize the advertising effect, to supply chain planning like which products should be produced in factories scattered around the world and distributed to which regions, the author explains various management topics in an interesting way, starting from problems that individuals can directly encounter in their daily lives, to the effective operation of a company, using concrete examples that can be directly experienced by the individual.
This can be easily guessed just by looking at the table of contents of this book.

However, the strength of the new book, "Management Concert," lies not only in its entertaining explanation of various topics, but also in its earnest pursuit of management principles and the historical development of modern management.
There weren't many general books that explained business administration in a way that the general public could easily understand, but even if there were, they explained only fragmentary principles, making it difficult for readers to properly understand.
However, this book explains in detail the implementation methodology, principles, and academic background of problems that have been unclear until now.
Therefore, after reading this book, you will not only enjoy the pleasure of clearly understanding the magical principles of modern management, but it will also be enough to attract the attention of subordinates, colleagues, and even superiors at company dinners.
In particular, numerous terms and industrial issues, such as profit management, data mining, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), manufacturing cycle time, and supply chain management (SCM), are covered in abundance, allowing readers to acquire the advanced knowledge necessary to accurately understand economic news.


The secrets of modern management that companies want to hide and consumers want to know!
A powerful and surprising story of modern management that moves the world unseen!

The new book, "Management Concert," is comprised of eight chapters, covering everything from the everyday experiences of modern people to effective business management in response to limitless competition and uncertainty.

Chapter 1 explains profit management, which maximizes consumer value and corporate sales and profits by applying the consumer-imposed value of a product to its price. It also explains the secrets hidden in airline tickets, the dilemma of hotel reservations, and why books shipped overseas are more than half the price in Korea.
Chapter 2 also helps readers easily and enjoyably understand the management theories deeply rooted in our daily lives through everyday examples that we can easily encounter, such as the issuance of loyalty cards, the reason why magazine booths are placed next to the checkout counters in large supermarkets, the reason why Amazon.com advertising emails are different for each person, and the reason why the search engine Google entered the mobile phone business.
Chapter 3 clearly explains the emerging collective intelligence by explaining why the David-like Netflix took down the Goliath-like Blockbuster, Google's eerie predictions of the future, and the significance of the U.S. Department of Defense's balloon-hunting event.
Chapter 4 explains why casinos and insurance companies, which are influenced by luck and uncertainty, are bound to make profits; Chapter 5 explains the direct cause of Samsung Electronics' growth into the world's undisputed number one semiconductor company; Chapter 6 explains the pros and cons of the Red Devils T-shirt stores that sold like hotcakes during the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup; Chapter 7 explains the birth of management science, which armed modern companies with cutting-edge science; and Chapter 8 explains how space shuttle operation technology entered modern management and what role it plays there, in a rich and fascinating way.
In this process, the fact that the true cause of Samsung Electronics' success was not its semiconductor integration technology but its excellent production system, and the fact that the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis were revealed are contents that cannot be easily found anywhere else.

In this way, the new book, "Management Concert," details management techniques and principles that have already taken root in actual management practices, but that have not been easily covered in previous management books.
In the process, we trace the historical process by which scientific principles such as statistics, mathematics, and physics were applied to management before and after World War II, and the process by which difficult management problems were solved one by one.
In addition, it introduces successful management theories chosen by 21st century global companies, along with various case studies.

Management principles from an MIT engineering PhD at the forefront of modern management.
A book created over a two-year period through bi-weekly web meetings between an American author and a Korean publisher!

Another feature of the new book, “Management Concert,” is the author’s unique background.
The author, a promising aerospace engineer who immigrated to the United States during high school and graduated with honors from Boston University with a degree in aerospace engineering, wrote this book while working as a project manager for the business operations planning team in the planning department of Micron Technology, a global semiconductor company. Why, with his engineering expertise, enough to have worked on projects with NASA, is now a project manager for the business operations planning team? He says his new book, "The Management Concert," offers "a long answer to this question."
He was struggling between the seemingly disparate fields of study such as engineering and business administration, and he said he was influenced by the words of current KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo, who said, “A true engineer should be evaluated by his social influence.”
He also revealed that he was greatly influenced by Professor Stanley Gershwin, with whom he had a 'napkin discussion' while receiving his master's and doctoral degrees at MIT.
In other words, the author says he found greater meaning in applying the ever-advancing science and technology to management to provide greater utility to more people.
As a result, he presents a panoramic view of the management field, which is becoming smarter day by day through encounters with cutting-edge science in the planning department of a global company, which can be said to be the forefront of modern management.
The content of the new book, "Management Concert," not only reveals the cutting-edge weapons companies currently possess to become more competitive, but also paints a concrete picture of our future.
In writing this book, the author added credibility to the content by basing it on case studies of companies recognized for maximizing operational efficiency and profits through scientific management in academic journals such as Nature and MIT Sloan Business Review, as well as reports from authoritative journals such as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week.
Moreover, the author presents specific situations that ordinary people experience in their daily lives, making it much easier for readers to understand.
Additionally, while writing the manuscript for this book, the author had to overcome geographical barriers between the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Seoul, South Korea, over the past two years.
The manuscript for this book, which started as a presentation material, was gradually refined over a period of two years through writing, erasing, and rewriting.
Through online video calls with the publisher every two weeks, we discussed the interests of Korean readers and included relevant cases and topics in the manuscript.
Additionally, the principles of modern management and further reading are organized into separate 'TIPs' to deepen your knowledge.
Through this process, the manuscript was rewritten about ten times, and a book was born.

In his new book, "Management Concert," the author challenges two prejudices about management.
The first is the prejudice that business administration is an academic discipline for a small number of corporate executives.
Through this book, the author aims to expand the scope of business administration to the general public and make it an essential liberal arts subject for the 21st century.
Second, there is a prejudice that management is synonymous with leadership and charisma.
This attempt to present the reality of cutting-edge management, which is demonstrating incredible power, transcending the limitations of management being the domain of specific heroes armed with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Especially for those who are still caught up in 20th-century common sense about management, he says, “Modern management has two elements: the humanistic element, which is the realm of people and emotions, and the scientific element, which requires analysis and calculation.” He also clearly conveys his feelings from the forefront of modern management, saying, “If the power of companies that have driven our economy and led the national economy so far has been this first cornerstone, then in order to grow into a super-global company in the new era to come, isn’t it time to put more weight on the second cornerstone, science?”