By SONG Jae-yong, Professor of Business Administration

As Peter F. Drucker once said, the 21st century will be characterized by a knowledge-based economy. Under this knowledge-driven economy, the importance of intangible assets; proprietary technology, premium brands, and personalized customer service, will determine companies' competitive edge, while the influence of tangible goods and services, capital and labor - the main forces behind the industrial revolution - will start to wane.

This will inevitably cause a seismic shift in the business world. Companies will need to be armed with a range of tools to strengthen intangible assets, like innovation capabilities, intellectual capital, a learning-oriented corporate culture, and management systems that lead to distinctive organizations.

It is a safe bet to say that the disparate fates facing GM and Toyota reflect their preparation for entering the knowledge-driven economy. Toyota has proved that an organization structured for learning-oriented and innovative systems will succeed in the long haul.

Like Toyota and GE, successful companies have their own unique, powerful and yet flexible corporate culture or management system. When the success of a company is sustained over a long period and establishes a differentiated and sustainable competitive edge, researchers call the management method and systems of such companies as a"way."

The Toyota Way is one of the most representative cases. Any company striving to be a top notch global company structures a corporate culture and management system appropriate to its history, strength, and environment. In the 21st century as global competition sharpens and as the knowledge-based economy develops its winner-takes-all tendency, imitation alone is not enough to secure a competitive edge.

Among Korea's companies, the typical case of developing a unique corporate management system is SK Group. The late SK Group chairman Chey Jong-hyun led and established advanced management systems in 1979, which it called SKMS (SK Management System). It celebrated the 30th anniversary of SKMS in March this year.

SKMS contains the basic philosophy of management, such as the corporate view of SK, the pursuit of value, management principles, and other ideas as well as principles of management execution, elements of management, and methods of pursuit to share the intrinsic understanding of corporate management by all constituents of SK Group. This facilitates the standard of decision-making to gather the strengths of constituents in one unit to contribute to enhancing competitiveness by improving the level of management.

In particular, the SKMS and SUPEX approach is the fundamental methodology of SKMS to pursue"Super Excellence." It has the goal of advancing SK Group's own advanced corporate culture and management system to be the foundation of SK and has helped in acquiring and integrating Yugong, Korea Telecomm and others.

According to a recent study, SKMS has attained management outcome improvements worth approximately 8 trillion won ($6.5 billion) to this point. The origin of a sustainable competitive edge or core competency is the hardest thing to imitate by competitors under the global knowledge-based economy. It progresses and advances to adapt to the times and the competencies of the company.

In this aspect, SMKS has become the most important source of competitiveness of the group with its 12 revisions in the past 30 years. The practical method in SUPEX has great implications for Korean companies that wish to become a top notch global company.

If a company wishes to attain status as a top notch company under the global knowledge-based economy, it should establish a well-systematized management system differentiated to the reality of the company as well as the paradigm of the external environment. It must also undertake the formation of a powerful, learning and innovation-striving organizational culture.