Last week, I posted about a great example of cultural effecting strategy by linking to the latest Stratechery post by Ben Thompson. Late last week, Ben and James sat down and recorded the latest Exponent podcast where they discussed the ideas in the post in much more detail, including many cultural observations that Ben shares.
It’s a great listen and worth your hour. You can find it here: http://exponent.fm/episode-030-xiaomi/
My first job was as a dish washer, affectionately known as a dish pig, where I would spend my hours tucked away out the back of a grimy Pizza Hut restaurant through my teenage years. It was great fun. Today’s post occurred to me when I was finishing up the night, cleaning up the dishes from our earlier meal. It’s hardly revolutionary.
It occurred to me that I still tackle doing the dishes in the same way I learnt to back then, when I would need to wash hundreds of plates an hour. Washing dishes at pace required that you sort and separate them into like piles. Plates were always the easiest, so they go together. Then cups. Then ‘others.’ Finally, the cutlery. It’s funny I still do this now.
It’s always curious when you catch yourself playing out the habits of days long past and can trace their roots back to inception. What skills do you still unconsciously carry out from long ago?
As for me…back to the dishes.
Simon Terry and I shared a conversation on CoTap recently about my last post (Bliss vs Blisters) and shared his own post that he’d written about a year ago. Like everything Simon writes, it’s terrific. Here’s my favorite bit. Enjoy your weekend, wherever you are in the world.
More than ten years ago I was doodling on a pad trying to find a focus to my diverse career history. I decided to draw a network diagram of my personal and work interests, the work that I enjoyed most and always chose to repeat. I drew lines where there were connections between these activities and interests. I began to build a map of my past life experience.
How do you follow your passion in your life? Through your career, your activities or something else? I’ve been thinking a lot about that these last six months or so and I think I have a few interesting ideas to share which were not things I’d originally considered. Before I get going, though, credit for the title of this post must go to Julian Waters-Lynch, who I shared a few conversations with on this topic when I was thinking through it a lot.
In Wrzesniewski’s research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.
This book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You:Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, really uncovered a particular bias I had adopted. It’s commonplace for someone of my generation to have this deeply held belief that we need to find out true calling in life – our passion – to be truly happy. Working, or doing anything for that matter, that isn’t in alignment with this ideal causes us to induce stress on ourselves that leads us to thinking we would be happier if only we were following our passion. This book looks and that and suggests that, in fact, those that are happiest in their careers are those that have worked at something for a great deal of their life. What they started in may not have been their passion in the beginning, but it has become something they’re passionate about over time.
In other words, working right trumps finding the right work
This really resonates with me, and I’ll tell you why. Because it primarly gave me permission to stop worrying about what my passion was. The corollary to believing that you should be following your passion is that you have to KNOW what your passion is. And that, at best, is a myth. Figuring that out is pretty close to impossible. The world is just too dynamic to really come to this easily. I tweeted this recently, from Nick Crocker’s great post about his system for better living.
It served as something quite empowering to me that what I should really be focused on was not figuring out my core passion in life; but instead focusing on the skills and things I’m doing right now and understanding how I can be doing them much better. Because within that I will probably find something I’m truly passionate about.
In the end, I still believe understanding what you’re passionate about is very important to continue attempting to understand. But more important is to continue developing the skills you have and the networks within which you practice them. You get the opportunity to do that, for the most part, every day when you begin spending time working. When you pair this with the approach outlined in the other book I wrote about recently, The Alliance, you’re left with a related number of powerful ideas which I’ve really been thankful for so far these last few months.
There’s a new post out on Stratechery today which I enjoyed reading this morning. I’ve not really read up or investigated Xiaomi, nor have I been a customer, so many of Ben’s posts discussing the topic are interesting to me. Mostly, this is because my bias’s about the company are fairly low. I’m uninformed and ignorant about their strategy and their products for the most part. In that light, todays post certainly did resonate with me in an area I’d like to think I am less ignorant – organisational culture.
This strategy also explains Xiaomi’s international expansion strategy: India – the world’s 2nd largest population – is already well underway, and Indonesia – the 4th largest – just kicked off. Brazil (5th) is coming soon. True, the United States (3rd) isn’t coming any time soon, but why bother? Apple has the fans, everyone has appliances, and yes, there is a bit of an IP problem.
This may be a long bow to draw, between Ben’s post which is obviously very strategy focused, and my own desire to talk more about operating and organisational cultures here on my blog. But it’s for that very reason that I like what this example displays so much. It’s an overt example of how a companies culture impacts upon it’s strategy. Xiaomi is a Chinese company and so with that comes everything that goes with that culture – including the apparent choices to not expand into the US as a growth strategy. Here in San Francisco, and indeed even in Australia, the general cultural world-view I’ve been exposed to with regards to growing a companies size and profits is to expand to the US or the UK. Yes, there’s been a much bigger focus on doing business with China (and Asia more broadly) in the last decade, but I find most of this bias still extends mostly to the mining and resources sector. Personally, in my experience, our cultural norms keep us focused on expanding into places that we’re very familiar with.
This is true at lower perspectives, too, but they’re less easy to see when you’re in an organisation. The choice to follow one strategic path or another is absolutely a product of the operational culture that your company has incubated over it’s entire life.
The Squiggly Line 
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