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Enthusiasm can be infectious. But it takes a rare ability to keep it alive among cynical employees and fickle customers. Interestingly, two senior managers seized upon the same word—"passion"—in this issue of Context to describe how outstanding organizations motivate people or create come-back-for-more customers. Undoubtedly, they are different facets of the same phenomenon, for passionate employees build passionate companies that create passionate buyers. David Pottruck, co-chief executive officer of discount brokerage house Charles Schwab, says in our cover interview ["Hearts and Souls"] that "business has become a battle to find people who will bring their brains, their hearts, and all their energy to work with them." He lays out a well-developed series of ideas for how to develop such passion among employees—in short form, he says to find values that employees can rally around, make sure you live up to those values, and then communicate like crazy with employees. Pottruck also tells some impressive war stories about how values have driven Schwab to make some excruciating, but eventually lucrative, decisions. Pottruck is doing a lot more than providing the standard lip service about the importance of values. One of his decisions, driven by what he saw as core values, involved giving up $125 million in profit in the first year. For Kevin Hartley, former chief marketing officer at utility company Green Mountain Energy, passion explains why consumers will pick your brand over another provider’s. He says in The Inner Game of Work ["Passion Play"] that he uses three principles to build passion. Perhaps the most important: Figure out what your customer is buying. In most cases, he says, your customer is buying an emotion, not a product—even though you think you’re selling a product. At Green Mountain, Hartley says, he wasn’t just selling electricity, or even "green" electricity, made from renewable resources—wind, water, and air. He was helping people reduce their feelings of guilt about the environment. People also will get charged up in a work environment where innovation is encouraged. That is the message in a feature article on Enron ["Gros Profits"]. Despite facing obstacles that other companies seem to find insurmountable—Enron is not only huge but also is in a less-than-scintillating industry, as an operator of natural-gas pipelines—the company has become an incubator of novel ideas. The latest: a market that trades telecommunications bandwidth. Business-reporter-turned-businessman Thomas Petzinger Jr. writes in the CEO User’s Guide ["I Link, Therefore I Am"] that many companies aren’t tapping the full passion of their employees. Petzinger says the solution is to adopt as broadly as possible the "open-source" software model. In other words, companies should ask as many employees, and even outsiders, as possible for help in shaping as many decisions as possible, on the theory that "nobody is as smart as everybody." For me, though, the most powerful piece in this issue is Man and Machine ["You’re the Doctor"], in which David Whitehorn-Umphres tells us how the Internet helped him cope with a surprise diagnosis of cancer. The piece won’t just change the way you view the Internet. It will change the way you think about doctors and illnesses, and may even give you a glimpse into the nature of our humanity. Here’s hoping that the passion he, and the rest of us, put into creating this issue creates some real enthusiasm in you, our readers. Cheers, Paul B. Carroll |
