Hi, my name is Julia Hanna; I’m an associate editor at the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Last November I flew to Seoul, South Korea to interview Michael Kim (MBA 1990) of MBK Partners. Often referred to as one of the “founding fathers” of private equity in Asia, Kim was born 60 years ago into a very different Korea. In 1970, when Kim was seven years old, Korea’s annual GDP per capita was just under $280. Still recovering from war and finding its financial footing, it’s a country that would be utterly foreign to today’s 10 million inhabitants of Seoul, a sprawling metropolis packed with boutiques, nightclubs, and skyscrapers.

Kim left Korea in 1974, at age 11. Educated in the United States, he returned as COO of Asia-Pacific investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in 1998 helped underwrite the $4 billion sovereign bond offering that recapitalized his home country in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

But Kim’s aptitude for finance is only a small part of who he is as a person. In 2020, he published Offerings, a deeply personal, autobiographical novel about a protagonist who grows up between two countries, navigating situations that challenge his loyalties, conscience, and sense of duty. The book, which will be made into a movie, took Kim 20 years to write.

Kim sees no conflict between the business and literary parts of his life. “I like doing deals because it’s a process of connecting things that were unconnected, just as you do in writing,” he says. “It’s making metaphors in business. The creativity of that is appealing.”

“In Harmony” is the story I wrote to better understand what that looks like for Kim—on and off the page. It’s published in the March issue of the HBS Alumni Bulletin and read by Ted Adams, our Director of Digital Communications.

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Like so many South Koreans of a certain age, Michael ByungJu Kim (MBA 1990) lives in a country where the past lingers, ever-present, beneath a gleaming, high-rise surface. On a Sunday afternoon in late November, Kim, 60, climbs the pathways crisscrossing Namsan, the 269-acre park rising high above Seoul. Soft yellow ginkgo leaves carpet the ground.

A man, decked out in a white tracksuit and bucket hat, strolls by with an enormous Afghan hound. Kim has walked here with his mother, who hid in a cave somewhere on the mountain with her mother and three siblings during the Korean War. A bomb blast—friendly fire from US troops—killed everyone except Kim’s mother and her younger brother.

The story is included in Offerings, Kim’s 2020 bestseller. In October 2023, news broke that filming of the book would begin in fall 2024, backed by Anonymous Content, the US production company behind Spotlight and The Revenant, and Korea’s Anthology Studios. Deeply personal and highly autobiographical, Offerings tells the story of Dae Joon, who comes to the United States from Seoul at age 12 and returns to his home country in his late 20s, MBA in hand, to help underwrite the sovereign bond offering that will save South Korea from financial ruin.

It’s a novel of many elements, somehow managing to mingle Korean folktales with scenes of high-stakes financial negotiation. It’s the story of grappling with a relationship to two countries (Dae Joon also goes by the very Western name of Shane) while managing the weight of a father’s expectations. It’s about navigating situations that challenge loyalties and conscience. And, finally, Offerings is also a love story of two people finding each other and figuring out where they belong in the world.

It took Kim nearly 20 years to write.

“My mother still has shrapnel in her stomach,” he says. “I’ve taken this walk with her to see if we can figure out where they hid. She’s kind of curious, but I also don’t think she wants it all to come flooding back. Inevitably we just enjoy the walk and come back down.”

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Kim moved to the United States in 1974, at age 11, and lived with his uncle in West Orange, New Jersey, until his parents and sister joined him a year later. South Korean president Park Chung Hee, elected in 1963, brought swift economic growth to the country—but by the 1970s he was also a de facto dictator, torturing and killing citizens who dared to protest for a more democratic government. Education was another driver for the family’s emigration. In Korea, the cultural drive to achieve the highest possible level of education is a defining characteristic, embedded in Confucian principles. A few days before the Namsan walk, Korea’s national college entrance exam took place—the test that, in the minds of most, will define their child’s future. Airline flights were suspended during the listening comprehension portion of the English test; financial markets opened an hour later to ease traffic and make it easier for students to reach testing centers, where anxious parents bowed and prayed outside.

When he arrived in the United States, Kim says, “I didn’t speak a lick of English.” These were the days before institutionalized tutoring schools, he explains—today a $20 billion industry in Korea. “My father had a strict military background and told me to learn English by reading books,” he recalls. When Kim reported that he could read but was having difficulty speaking, the solution was simple: read out loud.

He started with nursery rhymes, worked his way up to the Encyclopedia Brown series, and kept going. Charlotte’s Web was the first book in English to make him cry. Kim fell in love with books, later majoring in English literature at Haverford College and imagining what it would be like when he published his own novel one day.

But he was also intrigued by the students who were interviewing with investment banks. In the mid-1980s, the industry was booming: “The people at Haverford who had a zippy brightness about them were all applying to Morgan Stanley and First Boston and Goldman Sachs.” Kim wrote to Haverford alumnus and Goldman co-chairman John Whitehead (MBA 1947) and got the nod for an interview.

“The VP who interviewed me kept asking about topics that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal,” says Kim, who assumed “journal” referred to a more academic publication, not a daily newspaper. “I remember bluffing and saying that I read it religiously, every quarter. He looked at me. I said I read it every month. Then he laughed. I must have done just well enough on the other answers for them to invite me back.” His entry-level salary of $28,500 was “all the money in the world. I really thought I’d won the lottery.”

Early in his career, however, Kim realized something: He wasn’t certain of the finance industry’s inherent value to society—and he wasn’t sure being a great banker was his destiny. “But I sensed I could be good enough to make a mark,” he says. “It seemed like the quickest way to have an impact, if I wanted to give back to a society that somehow valued this specific ability I had.”

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At the Seoul offices of MBK Partners, Kim contemplates shelves of Lucite trophies commemorating some of the many successful deals of the private equity firm he cofounded in 2005. Others stretch back to his days as president of Carlyle Asia and COO of Asia-Pacific investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney. “It’s basically my career, crystallized,” he observes wryly. The trophies, and the magazine covers nearby, tell a very different story from Kim’s earlier, modest self-assessment.

With offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo, MBK Partners focuses primarily on buyouts of consumer-facing businesses in China, Japan, and Korea. With nearly $30 billion in capital under management, the firm is raising its sixth flagship fund, targeting $8 billion; the firm’s average aggregate internal rate of return is 22 percent.

Often referred to as the godfather of private equity in Asia, Kim has led some of the region’s most significant transactions at MBK, including the 2009 acquisition, with Goldman Sachs, of Universal Studios Japan; the 2013 acquisition of ING Insurance Korea; the buyout in 2015 of Tesco’s Korean subsidiary Homeplus; and the 2019 acquisition of Godiva Chocolate’s Asia-Pacific operations. Earlier, while at Carlyle, he oversaw the purchase of KorAm Bank in 2000 and its sale four years later to Citigroup, in a deal that more than doubled Carlyle’s original investment. That outcome caught the eye of many investors when Kim left the following year with a handful of Carlyle colleagues to raise MBK Partners’ first fund. Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, was an early investor; so was the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Before all that, however, while at Salomon, Kim—still in his 30s—played a major role in managing a $4 billion sovereign bond offering in 1998 that helped recapitalize South Korea in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

Eugene Tan met Kim when both were first-year associates working in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs in New York. He remembers Kim as someone who wasn’t shy about voicing his opinions or challenging authority, an unusual trait for the few Asians represented in the new batch of associates. “When he was sent over to Hong Kong to work for Goldman, it wasn’t the polished operation it is today,” says Tan. “Michael saw it as an opportunity to shine.” Kim did just that, quickly moving over to represent Salomon Smith Barney’s business in Asia, with a focus on Korea.

“People who went through the Asian financial crisis would probably remember that Korea was one of the worst hit, in terms of its currency and banking system,” says Tan.

The crisis, which began in Thailand, was fueled largely by aggressive levels of export-led growth, the pegging of Asian currencies to the US dollar, and rising US interest rates. During the crisis, the Korean won lost an estimated 50 percent of its value; a handful of chaebol, or conglomerates, went bankrupt. After several decades of impressive economic progress, Korea faced the humiliating prospect of seeing its credit rating drop to B2, below investment grade. In a stunning demonstration of national unity, a public gold-collecting campaign raised a little over $2 billion from Korean citizens to help repay $19.5 billion in IMF-backed debt, part of a much larger rescue package backed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and a group of countries.

Kim worked alongside representatives from Goldman Sachs to manage the sovereign bond offering that would help restore Korea’s liquidity. “There was a lot of pressure, needless to say,” says Tan. “It was Salomon’s biggest deal in Asia to date. Some even questioned why another bank hadn’t been chosen. Michael had a great rapport with officials in the Korean government and at the same time was able to harness the full energies of Salomon to make sure the deal did not go wrong.” In August 2001, Korea would repay the IMF in full.

“I had never felt that much weight on my shoulders,” says Kim, who convincingly depicts the cinder-block, fluorescent-lit, smoke-filled rooms of Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance in Offerings—in addition to the personalities involved on all sides. The book became a bestseller in the United States and a top seller in Korea despite being written in English. “Most of the details on the bond offering execution that appear in Offerings are true. People have come to me to ask, is this woman X and is this guy Y? What I would say in general is, it’s fiction. But there are details and thoughts that I pulled from my experience for verisimilitude.”

Kim sees his business and literary endeavors as complementary forces in his life. “I like to think there’s a balance and harmony between the two, that each makes the other better,” he reflects. “I like doing deals because it’s a process of connecting things that were unconnected, just as you do in writing. It’s making metaphors in business. The creativity of that is appealing.”

He completed an early manuscript, Heaven in Hell, as a second-year student at HBS and sent it to one influential literary agent. “I was convinced I’d written the next great American novel and that she would be the one to shepherd it to fruition,” he says. The agent wrote back, pointing out some of the manuscript’s strengths—and many of its weaknesses. Her recommendation? Put this in a drawer and start anew when you have more to say. “I took it personally; but that’s what I did. In hindsight, she was right. Recently, when I went back and looked at it, I found myself admiring the energy and the anger at the world’s injustices that come through in the writing. I turned 60 last year and can’t hope to recapture that.”

Anger is not a word that comes to mind in meeting Kim today—a somewhat imposing intensity is more like it. “I think I was drawn to Michael when we were in high school because he had this quiet confidence,” says longtime friend Joe Bovino.

Kim’s mother insisted that he complete his black belt in taekwondo before moving to the United States. It was the era of Enter the Dragon; one of very few Asians in his suburban New Jersey school, Kim remembers being asked if his hands were really registered as killer weapons with the FBI. “My mom’s strategy worked,” he laughs. “No one picked on me because they were afraid of being beaten up by Bruce Lee.”

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Questions around dual identities and nationalities have become part of the cultural dialogue; Past Lives, a 2023 feature film about Korean childhood friends—one who stayed, one who moved to the United States—has received multiple award nominations. Kim and his wife, Kyung-ah Park, are fluent in both cultures, traveling frequently between Seoul and New York City, where Kim serves on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and Carnegie Hall. “You hear the hyphenate as a descriptor a lot,” he says. “Korean-hyphen-American. I consider myself Korean and American.” The Korea he knew as a young boy was a much poorer country, where strict state control was the norm. “I was the envy of my classmates because I had Spam and egg in my lunchbox sandwich,” he says. “Those were things you just couldn’t come by.”

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A literal taste of what the United States could offer came when Kim’s mother took him by bus (“most of the vehicles on the road at the time were military Jeeps”) to an American restaurant with rock music playing on the jukebox. “I remember distinctly eating a cheeseburger and drinking a milkshake,” he says. “It was the weirdest and most delicious meal I’d ever tasted.”

The red and blue taegeuk at the center of South Korea’s flag represents the infinite interaction between the universe’s energies, similar to the concept of yin and yang. Korean and American. Novelist and dealmaker. Kim will tell you that these parts of himself are in harmony, preferring that word to the more Western concept of “balance,” which implies a trade-off. When asked, he will also say that he doesn’t subscribe to any organized religion. The tenets of Confucianism, with its emphasis on education and self-improvement, as well as duty to elders, parents, and teachers, probably comes closest, although it’s more a philosophy than a religion, he notes. And while he respects teachers, he also has always questioned them: “Maybe that’s the American in me.”

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There’s a direct line, however, between the very Confucian spirit of filial piety and the plotline of Offerings. Kim dedicates the book to his father, who died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2001, when Kim was 38; Dae Joon’s father dies of the same disease. The novel’s original title, Jagnam, or “eldest son,” highlights the pressure and expectations inherent in that position and the tensions it creates. Kim’s father expected him to get a PhD, so an MBA was a compromise. Scholars are at the top of the Confucian order; merchants, or businessmen, at the bottom.

Much like Dae Joon, Kim has found his own path. Entering the Asian private equity industry in its infancy was lucky, he will tell you, although hard work also played a part. Taking care of his family and returning the financial rewards of that success to the greater good makes cosmic sense to Kim: “We live in a society that disproportionately rewards people who can throw an orange ball through a hoop, people who can pick companies to invest in,” says Kim. “If you happen to be one of the lucky ones with a skill set that affords so much opportunity, it’s your duty to fulfill that promise and give back to the society that arbitrarily assigns that value.”

He’s well on his way to realizing that obligation, although the culture of private philanthropy is less developed in Asian cultures. To help shift that mindset, Kim launched the MBK Scholarship Foundation in 2008 to fund postsecondary education for promising students, based on need rather than merit alone (the Korean government has since followed suit). His dining-room table holds plans for a major public library to be constructed over the next several years; the Seoul Public Kim ByungJu Library will be the capital’s first civic institution funded entirely by an individual donation. He’s also in talks to build a library in Korea’s second-largest city, Busan. “It’s my attempt to be the Andrew Carnegie of Korea,” he jokes. “I’m just 1,798 libraries behind him.”

Kim isn’t old but he’s at a point in his life where he’s thinking about what he’ll leave behind when he’s gone. For hundreds of years, he says, Koreans celebrated just two birthdays. “If you made it to your first birthday you were probably going to have a life, considering that infant mortality rates were so high,” he explains. “And the 60th was, basically, you’ve had a good life.” Having reached that birthday last year, he’s thinking about his legacy. Pulmonary fibrosis, the illness that claimed his father’s life, is hereditary. While Kim is healthy, he thinks more carefully about how he spends his time. At first, he was reluctant to sell the movie rights to a story as personal as Offerings: “It’s one thing to write a book; a film feels even more public. But then I decided to just have fun with it.”

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In the same vein, Kim, a diehard Yankees fan, hasn’t given up on his dream of owning a professional baseball team. He’s also at work on a second novel (“a folktale with a twist”), even as the coming weeks find him on a grueling schedule, raising equity for MBK’s sixth fund and negotiating the details of his second library’s construction.

In other words, Kim is living in harmony, moving in new, unexpected directions while honoring the past—and the values that have brought him to this place.

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Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

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For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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