Why Korean companies are forcing their workers to go by English names (opens in new tab)

I lived in Korea for about a year and a half and Korean names were near impossible for me to remember en mass. That's because all Koreans have 3 syllable names, and they all use the same few syllables. To make it worse, many of these syllables sound alike!!!

When you have to remember the names of 20 or more people and they're like

"Kim-Yeon Lee" "Kim-Yeung Ye" "Kim-Hyun Ji"

I don't know how a non-Korean can keep up with that for any length of time when it involves a large number of Koreans. Many Koreans who speak English have English names they choose for interacting with foreigners and none of them seem to mind. It is very considerate of them because having to remember their Korean names can be painful for non-Koreans. I imagine it's also because my difficulty with Korean names was not something unique. It's probably something they noticed among many foreigners and compensated for.

Things are complicated:

- A good chunk of Koreans are Christians (either Catholics or American style Protestants), and get a biblical name at baptism.

- Many employees at those high-profile companies have studied or even lived abroad, and might have used another first name there. Some dual-citizens (which is a fairly new thing in Korea) even have different first names on their respective passports.

- There are many reasons behind using nicknames for correspondence with foreigners, it's not necessarily to make your company look more global than it really is (even though yes, that's also one reason). It isn't specific to Korean, but a lot of "first names" (typically the middle and last character) are not clearly associated to a gender, especially to foreign ears. Also, the romanization of Korean is a pretty confusing mess overall, unlike with Japanese for instance. There have been several systems in use, and names show the biggest inconsistencies (for example Lee, I, Yi, Ri, Rhee are all the same family name). Does "Yuna" mean Yeona like the skater or Yoona like the K-pop singer? You cannot know.

Now back to the policy discussed, I left Korea before it got introduced at my company, but I always found stupid to force people to pick another name. Lots of Koreans really don't want to. I called my VP by his real first name and he was fine with it.

>Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.

>But Boeing and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures [like the U.S., where hierarchies aren't as relevant]. But in cultures that have high power distance, it's very difficult.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm...