Minari: How a feature film taught us to overcome the cult of hard work
The cult of hard work
Modern day business culture has grown to fetishise hard work. Terms like “hustle” and “grit” have become part of the everyday business lexicon, albeit in a context that often misunderstands the original intent of the terms themselves. It’s understandable; people managers in most organisations are under constant pressure to squeeze ever-increasing amounts of efficiency from their teams, and the easiest answer is often “just work harder”. Hard work in itself is of course an admirable quality but without correct planning to funnel efforts to where they will have the most impact, sweat alone is misguided and wasteful. In the words of Microsoft’s former CTO Nathan Myhrvold:
“There's no point in beating your head against a wall... After you've given the wall a few good cracks, move over and try to find a softer spot in the wall.”
In the innovation game where resources are typically limited to begin with, this is where strategy and making choices becomes really, really important.
The cult of hard work
In their 2013 book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Roger L. Martin and A.G. Lafley proposed the now famous Strategy Choice Cascade. Here’s a common scenario we have seen in many organisations:
Someone in the C-suite has read a HBR article about the cascading choices framework and pushes it down to their leaders as “this is how we do strategy now”
The concept has been boiled down to a few boxes on a whiteboard, and eventually just referred to as “Where to Play and How to Win”
These two questions are now answered by each division in isolation, undermining the original intent of a jointly reinforcing strategy proposed by the authors (ie. each choice needs to link to the other choices in order to make the framework effective)
The answer to “Where to Play” when answered in isolation usually ends up being a variation on “Wherever we already play”; insurance companies will articulate that their playing field is selling more insurance, and consumer electronics companies will find extremely interesting and verbose ways of saying they’re in the business of selling electronics to consumers
The answer to “How to Win” ends up being a variation on “just work harder”... “same but more”, “be the best of the best”, “excellence in execution” etc.
The new strategy is triumphantly presented to the entire organisation in a lavish kickoff event, backed with the soundtrack of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk (a song that is ironically about a dystopian vision of robotic efficiency, epitomised by a factory production line)
Everyone goes back to doing whatever they were doing before
In these cases, the artefacts of strategy exist, but the most important question has been glossed over: What playing field should we be playing on?
Playing the waiting game
Early in his career, author Amer Iqbal founded a Sydney based tech startup with six of his university classmates. It was the early 2000’s and the term “digital” was beginning to take off. The budding business had some early success developing technology solutions for a variety of industry verticals; one early product was a web based practice management system for medical and physiotherapy clinics. The system handled appointments and seamlessly integrated with the industry standard software platform to securely manage patient records and issue prescriptions and medical certificates. Buoyed by some early success, the young team set their sights higher: they created one of Australia’s first wireless ordering management systems for restaurants where waiters would take orders on a Palm Pilot device, generating tickets that were wirelessly beamed back to the kitchen. Please take our humble word for it that this was considered revolutionary technology in 2001.
However, while the products were certainly of high quality and loved by their users, what the small startup lacked was any experience in sales and marketing. One particularly ill-fated attempt at generating demand was a three day sales push where the young entrepreneurs walked door-to-door around prominent restaurant and cafe districts in Sydney, asking to speak to the manager and pitch the product. One look at the obviously inexperienced wannabe tech moguls in their cheap, rumpled suits was enough for most establishments to politely chase them away.
After two years of operation, the young business was facing an existential crisis - despite an effective product development operation, they were unable to scale their customer base beyond a handful of local businesses. With their funding quickly running dry and increasing pressure to generate profitability, the young team took some time out to reflect and plan. What did they come up with? They decided to double down on their existing plan to scale the restaurant ordering system. They attempted a variety of new tactics: they hired a full time sales representative who worked on commission. They partnered with a product marketing organisation who promised to generate mass awareness in the hospitality industry for their product. They even looked into hardware partnerships that could potentially subsidise the cost of their system to restaurants who often liked the idea of wireless ordering but didn’t want to invest so heavily in complex technology (it turned out the hardware players weren’t interested). They worked around the clock to improve the product and build in customisations they were being asked for by their small set of loyal customers.
"Work harder" is not a strategic choice
After all of this increased effort, hard work and hustle, after displaying an impressive amount of grit - they got nowhere. The renewed strategy didn’t change a thing. Simply doubling down and working harder didn’t magically turn their fortunes around. When this became clear, the young startup found themselves at a cross-roads - should they persist with the business or simply give up and go out to find real jobs? In short, was it finally time to admit defeat?
Finding the right playing field
Minari is a 2020 film by Korean American writer director Lee Isaac Chung. It premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, and has since gone on to win a Golden Globe and six Academy Award nominations. If you haven’t seen Minari yet, you may want to skip this section as it contains minor spoilers. Also, go and watch it - it’s great.
The plot of the film is semi-autobiographical, following the Yi family as they move to a remote plot of land in rural Arkansas. The move is primarily motivated by the father of the family, Jacob, who aspires to establish a farm. The basis of his strategy seems sound on the surface: grow crops of Korean vegetables that can be sold to local stores in order to keep up with demand from a growing and underserved population of Korean families like their own who were moving to regional parts of the US.
While Jacob’s wife and two children struggle to adjust to their new isolated lifestyle on the farm, he ploughs ahead undeterred. He commences to sink all of his time, energy and the family’s meagre savings into the farm. He hires a local war veteran to help him tend to the crops. He refuses to “waste” time or money on establishing a sustainable source of water, so that when his makeshift well runs dry he is forced to sink more money into paying for water from the county supply. When his original buyer drops out at the last minute, he redoubles his efforts in sales, driving door to door to local grocery stores in an attempt to offload his now decomposing yield. His grit and refusal to budge from his plan drives him to double down and bring his family to the brink of bankruptcy and breakup in the process. Sound familiar?
Jacob's choice: just work harder
During all of these events, Jacob’s elderly mother-in-law, Soon-ja, quietly plants a crop of her own: a small plantation of minari seeds, a type of Korean water celery. She doesn’t rush into the decision, opting to plant minari only after discovering a small creek bed nearby that she thinks would be well suited to the plant. With minimal maintenance or effort, the minari crop flourishes. At the climax of the film, as catastrophe strikes the family and all seems lost, the minari crop proves to be the only thing they have left to show for their year of hard work on the farm.
Soon-ja picks the right playing field to succeed
It’s hard not to draw parallels between the plot of the movie and our startup dilemma. The lesson seems clear: by taking the time to first find the right playing field, coupled symbiotically with a choice of crop perfectly suited to the conditions, Soon-ja negated the need for hard work. She let the organic forces of her environment do the work for her. In this case, the strategic coupling of an opportunistic “Where to Play” with a reinforcing “How to Win” trumped any amount of hard work from Jacob and his best-practice farming approach.
Planting the seeds of innovation
Back in Sydney, Amer’s young startup was struggling with the decision to continue with the business or pack it in.
Around that time, they had been contacted by several advertising agencies asking about something called “digital”. Apparently their clients had been asking for digital marketing services in increasing numbers, but being 2003 the agencies had no capabilities in this space and were looking for local technology partners who may be able to help. With all of their focus on driving sales of the restaurant ordering system, the team had been ignoring these requests. However, with looming failure and no clear path forward, they decided to finally enter into conversations with a handful of ad agencies, rapidly pivoting into providing white-label web design and app development services for the agencies to on-sell to their clients.
The pivot was an instant success. The small startup that had been struggling for most of its short life suddenly had more work than it could keep up with, fuelling expansion in a business they had never even considered. This initial spike bloomed into a new business model that continued to provide profitable growth for the next decade.
Pivoting to the right playing field overcame the cult of hard work
In this case, an inexperienced startup was forced into an inflection point due to coincidental timing of one business opportunity closing down as another opened. However, the takeaway for anyone looking to drive innovation within their organisation is this: you don’t need to wait for coincidence to strike. To any experienced business in the early 2000’s, it was obvious that digital marketing was a rapid growth industry suffering from a skills gap - an easy playing field to jump on and ride the organic wave of growth, which is exactly what many companies in the field of advertising and marketing did.
This is a repeatable formula that can be applied at any time, simply by asking the question “What business are we in?” and being bold enough to explore a variety of possible answers. Much like planting a crop, it pays to invest in planning - find several potential playing fields that simultaneously show growth potential and could be a realistic playing field based on your organisation’s capabilities. These are the fertile grounds in which to plant the seeds of innovation.