---
title: The People Who Create Added Value (2) — Those Who Do the Same Job Differently
url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%EB%B6%80%EA%B0%80%EA%B0%80%EC%B9%98%EB%A5%BC-%EB%A7%8C%EB%93%9C%EB%8A%94-%EC%82%AC%EB%9E%8C-2-%EA%B0%99%EC%9D%80-%EC%9D%BC%EC%9D%84-%EB%82%A8%EB%8B%A4%EB%A5%B4%EA%B2%8C-%ED%95%98%EB%8A%94-%EC%82%AC%EB%9E%8C
date: 2026-09-28T12:18:58+00:00
author: SYSOP
summary: The closest kind of added value is simply doing your current job better than anyone else. From a foreman who became a vice president to master craftsmen on the factory floor, these are stories of people who created different value from the same work.
---
# The People Who Create Added Value (2) — Those Who Do the Same Job Differently

The closest kind of added value is not something far away. It's doing the job I'm handed right now better than anyone else.

There's a difference between "completing" your assigned share of work and doing it "differently." Even working in the same spot with the same tools, some people do only as much as they're told, while others make the work itself better. That difference is added value. And this kind of value usually comes back as the surest possible reward, because nothing pleases a company more than getting a better result for the same cost.

## From Foreman to Vice President

At Toyota in Japan, there was a man named Taiichi Ohno. In 1943, the position he first held was foreman at an engine plant. His assigned job was to supervise production. He didn't stop there — he dug into the question of how to run the plant without waste. Making only what was needed, giving workers the authority to stop the line themselves when they spotted a problem, visual management. The system he refined over some twenty years would later be called the "Toyota Production System" and become a textbook case for manufacturing worldwide. Having started as a foreman, he rose through the rank of director all the way to vice president. On top of the assigned task of supervision, he added "the way of working itself."

![Diagram of a rising staircase from work foreman to director to vice president](/uploads/6987a5dbb553e619.webp =720)

## Same Workplace, Different Thirty Years

You don't have to look far. The same kind of people exist in our own industrial workplaces.

| Workplace | Assigned Task | What Was Added on Top |
|---|---|---|
| Shipyard welding | Welding per blueprint | Process improvements, welding equipment development, patents |
| Auto repair | Fixing breakdowns | Feeding failure data back into design, roughly 1,000 quality proposals |
| Hotel cooking | Prescribed dishes | Establishing his own recipes as patents |

A technician who welded at a shipyard for thirty years didn't just hold a welding rod — he kept asking himself, "Can't this work be turned into a better piece of equipment?" and left behind several process improvements and patents, becoming a master craftsman at the company. A mechanic at an auto service center saw recurring breakdowns not as something to complain about but as data to feed back into design, producing around a thousand quality proposals and several patents. A cook in a hotel kitchen served the same dishes every day, yet dug in deep enough to have his own recipes registered as patents, becoming a master craftsman himself. Their assigned share was welding, repair, and cooking. What they added on top of it was "a way to make it better."

These three have something in common: no one ever told any of them to "come up with improvements." Welding just means following the blueprint, repair just means fixing the breakdown, cooking just means serving the prescribed dish. They simply didn't stop at that line. They kept repeating a single question every day — "why do we do it this way?" — and once that question had accumulated for thirty years, it became a value no one else could imitate. The added value in performance doesn't come from some extraordinary talent, but from that tedious, repeated question about how to make the same work better.

## Selling an Experience, Not a Product

The same principle applies to business. The American shoe retailer Zappos turned its assigned task of "selling shoes" into "selling a customer experience." Free returns for 365 days, unlimited consultation. There's a well-known story of a representative who stayed on a call with a customer for more than ten hours — and the subject wasn't a complaint, but advice about moving house. On top of the product — shoes — they added "the experience of talking with this company." The company was later acquired by Amazon for over a billion dollars.

Our own traditional markets have seen the same thing. One side-dish market in Seoul was a place where stores were shutting down one after another because of parking problems. Here, the side dishes for sale stayed exactly the same, but customers were handed old-style coin-shaped tokens and empty lunchboxes, adding "the fun of wandering the market picking things out." A place people used to come to buy side dishes became a place people came to have fun, and visitor numbers grew from 50,000 to 200,000 within a few years. What was sold wasn't the goods, but the experience of wandering through.

![Cards illustrating how Zappos and Tongin Market added experience on top of their products](/uploads/656344644c647f58.webp =720)

A beach in Yangyang, Gangwon Province, tells a similar story. It used to be a desolate stretch of white sand with nothing but barbed wire fences. There was nothing to sell. A young man added the experience of "surfing" to that place. He built an entire culture around it — riding waves, then unwinding at a lounge with music playing at sunset. As people flocked in to ride the waves, visitor numbers multiplied several times over within a few years, and the annual economic impact on the local area was estimated in the tens of billions of won. The experience added on top of empty sand had, in effect, created a market where none had existed.

The key is attitude. If you see your assigned work only as "something to finish," you'll stop exactly there. If you see it as "something that can be made better," the same work yields value no one else has managed to create. And that value usually comes back to you in the form of how you're treated.

In the next piece, I'll talk about taking a step outside your assigned share of work — the added value that's born from work no one asked you to do.