At the Intersection of Sushi and HR
A couple months ago I was flipping through my Netflix account putting some movies in my queue when I stumbled across a Japanese film called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”.
Now, I’m not a big fan of eating raw fish but I do like documentaries about chefs and food so I decided to give it a try. The title alone was worth at least a 15 minute investment.
As I watched the opening few scenes, I was leaning heavily toward shutting it off and switching to something with more explosives, car chases and bad acting, but I hung in there.
And then something cool happened…
Even though TV is my go-to outlet for “checking out”, I couldn’t escape work and began to notice a really strong “HR” message threaded throughout the movie.
Where HR & Sushi Collide
On the surface, JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is a sleepy, subtitled documentary about an 85 year old sushi chef who owns a 10 seat restaurant in the basement of an office building in a Tokyo subway. Seems pretty standard, right? There’s probably a few hundred of those in Tokyo but what makes Jiro different is that he’s the only sushi chef ever to receive a 3-Star Michelin review and, subsequently, he’s widely regarded as the top sushi chef in the world year-after-year.
I won’t give the entire movie away because I think you should all watch it (see the teaser below), but what made me think about “HR” as I was watching the film were two key concepts:
# 1 — Jiro’s passion for being great at just 1 thing — making sushi.
# 2 — How this same passion stunts the growth of his employees and his business.
The movie shows Jiro’s maniacal focus on his profession, his superhuman work ethic, his intense scrutiny during training, and his unwavering bond with his suppliers…all of which leads to flawless execution and a sublime experience for diners.
But it also tells a more subtle story of how micro-managing and being a control freak can stifle the development of your people.
I’ve watched the movie about 3 or 4 times now and each time I learn something new. I highly recommend you watch it.
Now…in my attempt to make this post interactive, I’ll leave a couple discussion questions for whoever was crazy enough to click on this post (and read this far down).
Is it okay to focus your entire career on being great at just 1 thing?
There is a lot of pressure in most organizations to grow laterally in order to grow vertically. Sometimes we call those people “blockers” and we force them to move. Or worse yet, they don’t get put on the HiPo track because they don’t have ambitions to grow into leaders and then it’s “Up or Out”.
Is there a place for “specialists” in your company? If so, what is the right balance of specialists-to-generalists in a department?
Interested in your thoughts, philosophies and other movie suggestions that — at first appear to have nothing to do with work — but if you look hard enough you find a magical thread for a random blog post!
