POSCO has a large number of subsidiaries around the world. One of the global branches of POSCO, Daewoo International in Shanghai, China is an international trading company that exports POSCO’s various steel products. Today, our global storyteller from POSCO-China shares us that Daewoo International in Shanghai has published a book called “Bloom in Daewoo”. Let’s listen to her story from here.
Interview with Editor of The Birth of “Bloom in Daewoo”- the First Collected Works of Employees
Everybody is familiar with books, but what about producing a book? Right, this article is to share “Fleet of Time” collected works edited, published and produced by Daewoo Shanghai.
This book consists of over 40 essays about company events, travels, and social issues that were written by employees from 2011 to 2014. It took about two weeks to complete and left a conclusion that it is “an aggravating process with a happy ending”. Therefore, POSCO-China has interviewed Nana Ma, one of the initiators of the publication, and shared her spirit and ingenuity embodied in the book with us.
Q：What kind of book is it?
A：This book is a record of all the articles of Daewoo Shanghai employees who have been contributing to “E-Spirit” journals since 2011. The book also includes some fabulous pictures that were submitted in travel photography contests organized by the company in the past two years.
Q：Why was the book edited internally instead of finding an outsourcer?
A：When the personnel manager told me that the general manager suggested internally editing the book, I considered it as a compulsory task so I was feeling only awkward, in Chinese, “Jiong”. There are many professional agents that specialize in publishing and printing books in the market. Everything will be taken good care of as long as our requirement is clear. So I started searching for such agents. However, the problem is that 100 prints are not enough for mass production whereas the overall expense is much more than that of printing 1,000 copies. Taking into account the cost of designing the page layout and back and forth communication with the agent for modification requests, this would be a time consuming, effort demanding and costly task. Eventually, we decided to select content, compile and proofread on our own and delegate only printing task to the agent.
Q：Did you come across any difficulty during the work? How did you overcome it?
A：However, as I think further, I wondered, ‘how can it be possible?’. I am only a little office clerk and have not ever worked professionally in publishing before. How can I know about page and layout design? Despite the anxious feeling, I had to carry on the task! Working as a deputy, witnessing our personnel manager implementing the project with a calm and organized manner. With ease and a step-by-step process from gathering materials, I felt more confident af if I have taken a sedative pill and started assisting my personnel manager on the project.
(The lady on the right is Nana Ma.)
Q：And what has attracted your continued attention during the editing process?
A：We sorted out all the articles in “E-Spirit” journals and image options from travel photography contests of each year. As a next step, we designed page layouts, unified line spacings, printed out pages, made a review, and manually adjusted the image formats in each article. Then, we classified into sections based on topics, created the index, designed the cover page, thought about titles together with colleagues, proofread the content and made modification page by page. New Year messages were appended at the end of the book, with collection of our pictures, wishes and prospects for the upcoming 2015. Our two weeks battle is summarized into only a few sentences. After receiving the final prints, seeing everybody like it, I felt so proud as if I am a child receiving compliments by others. My final impression: an annoying process with a happy ending.
This content has been created by Meng Jiaxi from POSCO-China.
