⁍ Lee Kun-hee was driven by a constant sense of crisis.

---

⁍ He instilled in his leadership teams to drive change and fight complacency.

---

⁍ In 2013, Forbes named Lee as the second most powerful South Korean.

---

– South Korea is mourning Lee Byung-chull, the billionaire ” heir to the Samsung empire” who died Sunday at the age of 78. Lee was the third son of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chull and oversaw the electronics giant’s rise from being a “second-tier TV maker” to the world’s biggest tech firm, with smartphones, semiconductors, and displays driving its success, per Reuters. But Lee was also known for his abrasive style, including a 1990s incident in which he recalled $50 million worth of poor-quality phones and fax machines and set them on fire, the New York Times reports. Lee, who had been hospitalized for a heart attack in 2014, died at his home in Suwon, south of Seoul, after a battle with lung cancer. The Times notes that Lee was known for holding “brutal” executive meetings that sometimes lasted 10 hours, with participants afraid to even drink water as they didn’t want to interrupt Lee’s flow by visiting the bathroom. “Lee’s business acumen made him the object of endless fascination and speculation in Korea, but he and the empire he built have also been vilified by critics and activist shareholders for wielding such economic clout, hierarchical and opaque governance, and dubious transfers of the family wealth,” the Times notes.