jiro dreams of sushi brookline
Hirotaka Takeuchi is a Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where has recently taught three second-year elective courses: Knowledge-based Strategy, Japan IFC, and Microeconomics of Competitiveness (which he co-taught with University Professor Michael Porter). He received a BA from International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, and an MBA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Takeuchi's first faculty position at Harvard was in the Marketing Unit from 1976 to 1983 as an Assistant Professor and his second as a Visiting Professor teaching the Advanced Management Program in 1995-1996. Starting in 1983, he taught at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and served as the Founding Dean of its business school, Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, from 1998 to 2010. He returned to Harvard Business School in 2010. Prior to his academic career, he worked at McCann-Erickson in Tokyo and San Francisco and at McKinsey & Company in Tokyo.
This year, Hiro Takeuchi will lead the Japan IFC: Tohoku; The World's Test Market for Authentic Entrepreneurship. HAVE YOU EVER TAUGHT AN IFC BEFORE? Yes, Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 (five consecutive years). WHAT INTERESTS YOU MOST ABOUT BUSINESS IN JAPAN? Japan has always said, "Japan has no natural resources; the only resource it has is people." What interests me most are people working in Japan, some of whom our MBA students will meet -- e.g., the cleaning crew of Tessei at Tokyo Station, social entrepreneurs in Tohoku, CEOs at Suntory and Fast Retailing who see their mission as "doing good for society and mankind," and celebrities who appeared in the Rio Olympics, including Super Mario, Hello Kitty, Pokemon, as well as a real-live Olympian athlete. WHAT EXCITES YOU MOST ABOUT TRAVELING WITH MBA STUDENTS? Listening to stories over drinks on what surprised our MBA students the most about Japan -- e.g., no trash cans anywhere, but no trash on the streets;
WHAT ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS A TEAM OF STUDENTS CAN DO TO BUILD RAPPORT WITH THEIR PARTNER COMPANY? Learn to say a few words in Japanese, like "Arigato...thank you," "Konnichiwa....good day," and "Oishii desu....it is delicious.
jiro dreams of sushi pelicula completa WHAT CAN EACH STUDENT DO INDIVIDUALLY TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR PARTNER COMPANY THROUGHOUT THEIR ENGAGEMENT?
samurai sushi menu broussard la WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH A PARTNER COMPANY? Speak slow/enunciate clearly and smile/laugh a lot.Sushi I LlSushi TimeSushi PokeSushi MmmmmmI Love SushiSushi SushiFood SushiFood LütSalmon CaliforniaForwardGreat recipe for Salmon California Rolls. I love California rolls. I made an extravagant version by adding salmon. Using plastic wrap will prevent the rice from sticking to the mat, giving it a cleaner finish.
The Priest and the Parachute It began with a joke. In 1968, Richard Bolles, an Episcopal priest from San Francisco, was in a meeting when someone complained about colleagues “bailing out” of a troubled organization. To remind the group to return to this topic, Bolles jotted a clever phrase on the blackboard: “What color is your parachute?” The line got a laugh, but as Bolles recalls in a 1999 interview with Fast Company, “I had no idea it would take on all this additional meaning.” Two years later, Bolles lost his job as a priest and was shuffled into an administrative position in the Episcopal Church, advising campus ministers, many of whom were also in danger of losing their jobs. Noticing a lack of good advice on the topic, Bolles self-published a 168-page guide to navigating career changes, which he handed out for free. Looking for a catchy title, he re-purposed his blackboard one-liner. The initial print run was one hundred copies. The premise of Bolles’ guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear: “[figure] out what you like to do…and then find a place that needs people like you.”
But in 1970, this concept was a radical notion. “[At the time], the idea of doing a lot of pen-and paper exercises in order to take control of your own career was regarded as a dilettante’s exercise,” Bolles recalls. It was also, however, a period of extreme workplace transition as the post-war industrial economy crumbled before an ascendant knowledge work sector. Uncertain employees craved guidance, and Bolles’ optimistic strategies resonated. The book that began with an one hundred copy print run and a clever name has since become one of the bestselling titles of the century, with over 6 million copies in print. This story is important because it emphasizes that one of the most universal and powerful ideas in modern society, that the key to workplace happiness is to follow your passion, has a surprisingly humble origin. What began as a quip jotted down on a blackboard grew into the core principle guiding our thinking about work. “What color is my parachute?”, we now ask, confident that answering this question holds the answer to The Good Life.
But when we recognize that this strategy is not self-evident — and in fact not even all that old — we can begin to question whether or not it’s actually right. And when we do, it’s dismaying what we find… Let’s summarize Bolles’ insight as follows: the key to a fulfilling career is to first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match. For simplicity, I’ll call this the passion hypothesis. We can think of the past forty years — the post-Parachutes era — as a vast experiment testing the validity of this hypothesis. The results of this experiment, unfortunately, are not pretty. The latest Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction, released earlier this year, found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61% recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center, notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”
Though many factors can account for workplace unhappiness, a major cause identified by the survey is that “fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.” Put another way, as we’ve placed more importance on the passion hypothesis, we’ve become less interested, and therefore more unhappy, with the work we have. I call this effect the passion trap, which I define as follows: The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have. I argue that the passion trap is an important contributing factor to our steadily decreasing workplace satisfaction. So far, however, my evidence for this claim is circumstantial at best. We need to dig deeper. The Young and the Anxious If the passion trap is real, recent college graduates should be the most affected. At this young age, before the demands and stability of family, their careers are more likely to define their identity. It’s also the period where they feel the most control over their path, and therefore also feel the most anxiety about their decisions.
This predicts, therefore, that the passion trap would make young workers the most unhappy. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Conference Board survey finds. Roughly 64% of workers under 25 say that they are unhappy in their jobs, the highest levels of dissatisfaction measured for any age group over the twenty-two year history of the survey. To better understand why young people are so unhappy, let’s turn to Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 ode to youth disaffection: Quarterlife Crisis. This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy twentysomethings, and as the passion trap predicts, most of the stories revolve around uncertainty regarding the search for the “right” job. Consider, for example, the tale of Scott, a 27-year-old from Washington D.C.: “My professional situation now couldn’t be more perfect,” Scott reports. “[I] chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics.” Scott succeeded in this pursuit.
Though he had to start at the bottom, as a volunteer campaign aide, within two short years after college graduation he had the “Capital Hill job I dreamed of.” Rationally, he should be happy with his work: “I love my office, my friends…even my boss.” “It’s not fulfilling,” he despairs. He has since restarted his search for his “life’s work.” “I’ve committed myself to exploring other options that interest me,” Scott says. “But I’m having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.” The passion hypothesis was so ingrained into Scott’s psyche that even his dream job, once obtained, couldn’t live up to the fantasy. Story after story in Quarterlife Crisis follow this same script: “I graduated college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me,” says Jill. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t found it. “I’m so lost about I want to do,” despairs 24-year old Elaine, “that I don’t even realize what I’m sacrificing or compromising.”
The passion trap strikes again and again in these pages. This all points towards a troubling conclusion: not only is the passion hypothesis wrong, it’s also potentially dangerous, leading us into a passion trap that increases our feelings of unhappiness and uncertainty. These initial articles in my Rethinking Passion series have been negative. My goal was to tear down our assumptions about workplace happiness, because as long we cling to the passion hypothesis, other factors will remain obscured in its high-wattage glare. Soon, however, I’ll be taking on the positive task of figuring out what does matter. I’ve written at length about the importance of ability and craftsmanship in developing passion for your work (see here and here and here), but I also want to explore equally important (and equally nuanced) factors, such as: Stay tuned for this discussion to continue, and in the meantime, I welcome your own reflections on the reality — not cliches — of finding fulfilling work.