“Small actions”, Signature Skills and Mashed Potatoes
Written by Eric Sim
After the fireside chat at the E-Lab, I went to Paris to try mashed potatoes—not just any mashed potatoes, but the ones at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon. The late Mr. Joël Robuchon was a legendary French chef and restaurateur, who held 32 Michelin stars in 2016.
His restaurants boast many well-known signature dishes, but the one that garners the most attention is his mashed potatoes. Robuchon combines ice-cold butter and hot potatoes at a 1:2 ratio. After vigorous mixing, the result is a silky-smooth dish. Guess how much it costs? It’s free: it came with my seabass main course.
The head chef, Axel Manes, who took over the restaurant from Robuchon, came over to my seat by the counter to say “hi”. I told him the mashed potatoes were the best I had ever tried. He was very pleased. He told me he has two people in the kitchen whose only job is to prepare the mashed potatoes, just the way Robuchon wanted the dish to be done.
Of course, the restaurant isn’t giving away mashed potatoes and getting nothing in return. “I owe everything to these mashed potatoes,” Robuchon once said during a demonstration of how to make his most iconic dish. The signature mash helps turn first-time diners into regular patrons, who spread the word about the great food and encourage more people to visit. The free mashed potatoes are also an effective marketing tool to attract customers because they appeal to most people’s tastes.
But what’s one of the most profitable items on Robuchon’s menu? It’s wine, or more specifically, red wine. There are several benefits that come with red wine: dozens of bottles can be easily stored, the restaurant isn’t worried about a rival copying the recipe, and it takes just a minute or so to serve as it requires no preparation.
These red wine and signature dish examples don’t just apply to the restaurant trade; we can learn from them and apply them to our careers. The skills you learn at the University of cambridge and in the workplace are mostly red wine skills. They’re the core abilities you need to perform the fundamentals of your day job—skills that you and your employer can access as easily as a waiter can pluck a bottle of red wine from the rack. In investment banking and management consulting, red wine skills for junior roles might include financial modelling or pitch-book preparation. In computer engineering, a red wine skill is knowing how to develop an app.
But although red wine skills allow you to do your job well, they’re not sufficient to help you advance your career because everyone else in your team has them too. That’s why you also need signature skills (your own version of Robuchon’s mashed potatoes) to attract new opportunities and make new contacts. These skills need not be expensive to acquire but should be useful to many people. Perhaps you could develop public speaking skills to be the MC at company events or develop video editing skills to help your colleagues edit your CEO’s recorded speech.
I’ve had a few signature skills at different stages of my career, so I’ve learned the importance of not letting them stagnate. Back in the mid-1990s, I worked in foreign exchange (FX) sales at DBS Bank in Singapore. My FX knowledge generated revenues for the bank just like red wine makes money for a restaurant. My mashed potatoes were my computer programming skills because, in those days, not many front-office staff knew much about coding. I was able to program FX swap pricing using the C++ language I’d learned as an engineering student. While the bank didn’t pay me extra for this, it did get me noticed as a junior. My bosses wanted to automate processes within the department, so they came to me.
When I moved to Citibank for most of the 2000s, I took on two new signature skills: photography and running training sessions. I initially covered Asia from the firm’s Singapore office, and my bosses often invited me to train staff and clients in the Asia region, from Thailand to Hong Kong. I also volunteered to take photos at client offsite events. This helped to strengthen my relationships with bosses and clients.
In November 2006, I requested to move to Hong Kong. My bosses readily agreed, and within two months, I relocated to Hong Kong. This was the highlight of my career and it built the foundation for me to move into investment banking later on. It wasn’t just my (red wine) banking skills that got me the job; it was also my version of Robuchon’s mashed potatoes.
A signature skill should be in an area that interests you, so it’s easy to acquire and can benefit your colleagues, clients, and friends. It should also be unique within your company. Had I worked in a tech firm instead of a bank, my C++ expertise couldn’t have been a signature skill because many of my colleagues would have also known the language.
Similar to Robuchon’s mashed potatoes, your signature skill can be a small one that is simple and quick to acquire. It should be useful to a wide range of people, including senior managers. As AI becomes part of our daily workflow, you could learn how to train and customise AI. Senior managers who are curious about it will then go to you for advice.
But remember that when many people around you have acquired the skill, it will no longer be a signature skill of yours, so you’ll need to move on to the next one. Keep looking out for new trends... one of them could well be your next mashed potato.
Eric Sim
Eric Sim, CFA, is the author of "Small Actions: Leading Your Career to Big Success”, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). As a key opinion leader, he shares practical and actionable tips to help individuals achieve their career goals and he draws these tips from his diverse real-life experience — from selling street food and training to be an engineer, to becoming a managing director at UBS Investment Bank. Currently based in Singapore, Eric founded the Institute of Life to help young professionals achieve success in both work and life.