YSB Management Professor Mooweon Rhee has received the 2017 Chohun Academic Award, a prestigious recognition given annually to an outstanding YSB professor to encourage further academic development of the business school.

The award is sponsored by Kumbi CEO Goh Byeong Heon (entering class of 64, Business). The award was presented December 8 during a year-end party hosted by the Alumni Association of the College of Commerce and Economics and YSB.

[Standing with Professor Mooweon Rhee (center) are (from left) YSB Dean Young Ho Eom, Chair of the Alumni Association Kyung-Bae Suh, Kumbi CEO Goh Byeong Heon, and Dean Hun Hong of the Yonsei University College of Commerce and Economics.]

Professor Mooweon Rhee was a professor at University of Hawaii from 2004 to 2013, when he joined YSB as a professor in the Hyundai Motors endowed chair. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Yonsei University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Since he joined YSB, he has been giving lectures and conducting research in various fields.

Professor Rhee’s scholarship in management and organizational theory has resulted in 13 papers published in the world’s top 50 academic journals, according to the Financial Times and more than 40 papers published in international journals.

His paper on “Great vessels take a long time to mature: Early success traps and competences in exploitation and exploration” was published in the top journal Organization Science in 2015. This paper has important implications regarding which strategy enables sustainable growth of a firm by examining why firms with early success are faced with a crisis. Another paper, “K-Pop’s global success didn’t happen by accident” published in the Harvard Business Review in 2016 is famous for its academic analysis of the K-Pop wave as the result of strategic and continuous talent management, not the accidental success of a few K-Pop stars. This study has interesting implications for business in terms of talent selection and management.