HYBE vs. Min Hee-jin

So many people, regardless of their own fields, are voicing their opinions on this that I haven’t been able to escape it all week, and it’s exhausting.

Since I can’t get away from it anyway, if I were to lay out my own view: some people still seem stuck in a manufacturing-era mindset (and even then, cutting-edge manufacturing today is hard to succeed in with that old mindset), and many others seem to lack a concrete understanding of law and contracts. By “law” here I don’t mean the specific rights and wrongs defined in Korean statutes (which, of course, can also lead to very different outcomes depending on interpretation), but rather why the abstract concepts of law and contract exist in our society in the first place.

Opinions seem to diverge mainly on three big points: Min Hee-jin’s contribution to NewJeans’ success, what level of compensation is appropriate, and the contents of the contract (which no one has actually seen). Watching how people react to this case, I find it a bit frightening when some try to neatly sort everyone into categories like “unemployed” or “has real work experience.” What that really means is they don’t tolerate diversity of opinion on matters that can’t be cleanly judged one way or the other. People like that are highly likely to be very difficult to coexist with when views don’t perfectly align. To put it more bluntly, they’re unlikely to be helpful to a society that exists for the shared survival of humankind.

A few weeks ago, talking with my parents, we shared the view that “office politics is a skill.” In people-centric businesses like entertainment, I think the core capabilities ultimately come down to communication with the public, image, and framing. Even creative directing, which looks extremely close to pure art, can ultimately be seen as a strategy for how to communicate with target consumers through which medium and in what way. HYBE’s decision to put out a press release first about this situation can be seen as an attempt to impose a particular frame on Min Hee-jin in the eyes of the public. In this context, I think talking about the “appropriate tone and manner or outfit for a press conference” completely misses the point. What matters right now for HYBE and Min Hee-jin is (1) securing legal advantage and (2) the rights to the NewJeans IP.

On (1), I don’t think HYBE is clearly in a superior position. Min Hee-jin, as CEO, already holds management control over ADOR, so what exactly is HYBE “seizing”? If the issue is ADOR’s shares and ownership, as attorney Lee Hyun-gon has said, even a hostile M&A is not illegal. It’s also inappropriate to view this as a breach of fiduciary duty. Min Hee-jin is the CEO of ADOR, not part of HYBE’s management. Even if she actually tried to separate ADOR from under HYBE’s umbrella, that can’t automatically be seen as going against ADOR’s interests. Since even lawyers are split on this, it’s hard to speak definitively, but if HYBE had secured a clear legal upper hand, I don’t think they would have needed to engage in media play about things like “exercising audit rights” or “shaman management.” For reference, there’s a story that a certain domestic semiconductor company’s chairman chose a plant site based on what a shaman told him.

On (2), I think Min Hee-jin is overwhelmingly favored. Given the nature of the entertainment business, without NewJeans’ massive fandom, the value of the NewJeans IP essentially converges to zero. Because Min Hee-jin planned and created NewJeans, and because public opinion within the fandom after the press conference is overwhelmingly on her side, the odds are high that the rights to the human capital called NewJeans will end up with her. If someone objects that the NewJeans IP legally belongs to the ADOR corporation, I’d say they don’t really understand that a corporation is just a legally constructed persona—a shell. In the end, the key capability is moving the hearts of the NewJeans members and their fandom, and that’s the kind of fight only the person who can do that will win. On that front, Min Hee-jin holds an overwhelming edge.

The claim that “without HYBE’s system and global network, could NewJeans have been this successful?” strikes me as something you’d say only if you really don’t understand the global entertainment industry. The entertainment business is always desperate to discover and develop new stars. In a market where everyone is obsessed with new IP, systems and networks are not what give you a major competitive edge. Even my friend’s four-member indie band from high school, with just one track recorded on a MacBook Air, received offers with advances of over $500,000 from leading major record labels around the world, and they chose to sign with the label that best fit them.