CHAPTER 9

INTEGRATING PASSION AND PROFESSION

Searching for your passion of the explorer will help you achieve far more of your potential, so it’s worth doing well. You can greatly increase your potential for impact if you find a way to integrate your passion into the way you earn your living. This effort tends to run into resistance; as the previous chapter noted, organizations want dedicated workers but are rarely set up to benefit from creative people pursuing their passion of the explorer. However, as this chapter will show, we have some options for overcoming that resistance.

THE IMPERATIVE AND THE CHALLENGE

The Big Shift has been reshaping the business landscape for the past several decades, expanding opportunities while also intensifying pressure in the workplace, leading to stress, fear, and the risk of burnout. Without the passion of the explorer, we won’t be able to muster the creativity and persistence necessary to address those opportunities.

To avoid that risk and address that opportunity, we need to integrate our passion and our profession, something few of us have been able to do thus far. At the Center for the Edge, we conducted a detailed survey of the US workforce and found that only 14 percent of workers experience the passion of the explorer in their jobs.

Despite more and more talk about the need for “lifelong learning,” we hear very little about where the motivation to learn is supposed to come from. The unstated assumption appears to be that it is fear: if we don’t add to our skills and knowledge, we will lose our jobs. True, fear can prompt us to do some learning, but those of us who have the passion of the explorer do not view learning as a burden. Instead, we actively embrace it, especially when we can gain new knowledge through working with others.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of us work for institutions that are wary of edges and deeply suspicious of the passions that draw people to explore them. One of the biggest reasons why only 14 percent of the US workforce has the passion of the explorer is that employers actively work to suppress it. That even those few have the passion is a tribute to their success in suppressing this emotion.

We were taught to think of our work as the price we must pay for the material resources needed for enjoying the rest of our lives. Our work environments were carefully designed to deliver scalable efficiency; there was no place for passion in them, we were told. Passionate people do not follow standardized scripts well. They are constantly improvising, challenging 169conventional wisdom, and striking out on new and unexpected paths. Passionate people are unpredictable; they take risks. They also detest the organizational politics that pervade their institutions, as leaders jealously protect their power and hoard resources.

Very few institutions measure the passion of their workforce. Instead, they are consumed by the concept of worker engagement. While definitions of worker engagement vary quite a bit, they generally focus on three elements: Do the workers enjoy the work they do? Do they like the people they work with? Do they respect the company or institution that they work for?

The evidence that engaged workers perform at a higher level than workers who are not engaged is irrefutable. But is engagement enough? Engagement as conventionally defined does not include a commitment to achieving higher and higher levels of impact over time. In this era of mounting performance pressure, such a commitment is an imperative. And that commitment is precisely what passionate explorers pursue.

There is another reason why worker engagement may be a misleading metric. Think about engaged workers who enjoy the work they are doing, and then imagine that you will now tell them their work must fundamentally change, given the new developments in the marketplace and the world at large. What is their reaction likely to be? For many, it will be resistance. They’ll want to hold onto the work they enjoy so much. Passionate explorers, in contrast, welcome change. In fact, they actively seek it out because they view it as an opportunity to develop new capabilities and have even more impact.

SMALL STEPS TO CONSIDER

Given the degree of institutional resistance to passion, how can you find a way to integrate your passion with your profession? You start by taking some small steps. Reflect on your existing work and see if you can find elements in it that excite you. Then see if you can identify opportunities to evolve your work to build on them. If you work for a large institution, for example, do opportunities that would more effectively align with your passion exist in other parts of the organization? Suppose you work in the sales department, while your passion is much more aligned with marketing. Perhaps you could find a way to shift into that part of the organization.

A woman I worked with found herself in exactly this position. She had been a successful salesperson for a large automobile company but found the transactional approach of sales to be limiting. She had begun to see patterns of unmet needs and was excited about the opportunity to design and deliver marketing programs that would address those needs. As she gained more insight into the passion of the explorer, she was moved to find a way to pursue this opportunity. She reached out to senior marketing executives in her company and eventually found one who was intrigued by the opportunity she had identified and, more importantly, by the passion she displayed in her conversations about it. That executive shifted her into his department as one of his direct reports. Her efforts have achieved significant success. More importantly, she is now excited about going into work every day.

Another key is to seek out others within the institution who may share your passion of the explorer, so you can support and reinforce each other on your quests. Admittedly, there are likely to be very few, given the statistics I’ve cited, but there are some. The challenge is to find them.

Because of institutional resistance, those people are usually well hidden, pursuing their passion when no one is looking. Don’t look for them in the core of the enterprise, in the most traditional jobs. Instead, they are likely to be in some newer part of the organization or in a distant branch office, where they have more freedom to pursue their passion. If possible, try to organize a small impact group of similarly motivated people so you can reinforce and multiply each other’s impact.

Depending on the specific domain your passion focuses on, you may need to look outside the institution where you work. You may have ended up where you are because of accident, necessity, or social pressure—say, your parents convinced you that the only way to be successful was to become a lawyer. If that’s the case, you might be able to start doing something in your spare time that is more aligned with your passion but also generates income. Perhaps you’re already doing something you’re passionate about, like woodworking or writing, as a hobby. Is there an opportunity to start generating some income by selling the products or services generated by your passion? This could become a path to your transition.

Ultimately, aligning your passion and profession may require looking for a new job in a new company, starting your own business, or moving to a different geographic region. That certainly will take an effort and pose a significant risk, but the rewards are likely to make it worthwhile. Take some time to reflect on the implications of staying in an institution that provides no outlet for your passion and demands more and more from you in areas you do not find fulfilling. Yes, you may be under a lot of short-term pressure to make a living, but you are likely to be even more successful when you find work that aligns with your passion.

A remarkable example on this front is a client I worked with who was a senior administrator at one of the leading universities in the United States. While very successful at a relatively young age, he was troubled by the fact that he found his work boring. He was intrigued by my notion of the passion of the explorer and asked me if I could help him find his. As we worked together, he realized that what excited him the most was fixing appliances. Since he had been a child, he had loved taking things apart and putting them back together. He loved the challenge of diagnosing problems and, most importantly, finding ways to repair them. As prestigious and highly paid as his administrative work was, it mostly involved processing endless paperwork, which drained him of all his spirit and energy. He couldn’t wait for the end of the workday.

Before long, he decided to change his life. To the astonishment of his colleagues and everyone else in his life who didn’t know him well, he quit his high-powered job at the university and set up an independent business as a handyman. He suffered a significant reduction in income in the short term, but his passion brought him great success. Word spread about the fix-it man who never gave up on a problem, and before long, so many people were calling him that he had to turn away some jobs. The last time we spoke, he told me he was looking to hire people to help him. Drawing on the lessons he had learned, he was determined to hire only people who shared his passion. He didn’t want to hire someone who just needed a job.

I’ve been on this journey myself. Early on, I decided to accumulate as many academic credentials as I could. My parents paid a significant price for that, for which I am eternally grateful. But I also paid a significant nonmonetary price by enduring years of “education” that required me to go through endless classes and courses. Fortunately, I was able to skip most of the classes, read the assigned texts, and demonstrate that I had memorized the relevant material.

Once I graduated, I resolved to find a profession that would align with my passion. I actually turned down an opportunity that would have paid me millions as a very young man, because I found the work to be uninteresting. Over the next couple of decades, I shifted back and forth between startups and large management consulting firms. At the startups, the process of taking a business concept and working with others to make it a reality was deeply satisfying but also totally consuming. In those jobs, I lost any perspective on the rest of the business world and my personal life. The upside of consulting was that it exposed me to a wide range of business problems and people that stimulated and challenged me. I was stimulated by the fact that I could never predict what the next day would bring. I was torn between these two sets of experiences—startups and management consulting.

It took me a while, but I finally realized that the best way to integrate my passion with my profession was to do something entrepreneurial within a larger management consulting firm. While I was at McKinsey & Company, I helped to launch the firm’s office in Silicon Valley, and I launched two consulting practices within the firm. Years later, when I was asked if I would be interested in setting up a new research center at Deloitte, I jumped at the opportunity, not least because it gave me a chance to explore new kinds of institutional platforms.

The journey continues. Writing this book has been a catalyst for me to imagine a new platform—something I call an activation center. While I will continue to research the journey beyond fear, my more important goal is to develop programs and platforms that will support people in making the journey beyond fear and help to evolve institutions that encourage and reward that journey. This will integrate a different form of consulting (perhaps better described as coaching) with a bold entrepreneurial effort to become a catalyst for a much broader movement to redesign our institutions so they become places that nurture the passion of the explorer.

DRIVING CHANGE FROM WITHIN THE INSTITUTION

While some people may have to do more soul searching to discover a company and a role that aligns with their passion, some of us are lucky enough to already work in a company within our domain. Your issue might be that the work you’re doing isn’t as well aligned with your passion as it could be or that your institution’s leaders are insufficiently supportive. In that case, you should consider focusing on driving change within your institution.

Even those who have discovered their passion of the explorer and pursued a career that integrates it are often unhappy in their jobs, frustrated by the obstacles they encounter at every turn. They see all the possibilities but experience the barriers that keep them far out of reach. Well-meaning mentors advise them to get with the program and embrace the institutional agenda, even if it means leaving their passion at the door every morning. These people are naturally frustrated that what should be their biggest asset is viewed as a threat.

Rather than just tolerating the prejudices of our institutions, we need to issue a call to action within them, catalyzing and driving efforts to transform them into places that don’t merely tolerate the passion of the explorer but actively foster it. Ultimately, that may be the best way to integrate our passion and our profession.

While this battle can seem overwhelming in the short term, we can draw hope and inspiration from one inescapable fact: one way or the other, our current institutional homes have to change. Performance pressures will continue mounting, driven by the broad deployment of new technology infrastructures and public-policy trends that are reducing barriers to entry and movement. If they don’t change, they will fall by the wayside as a new generation of institutions specifically designed to address those unprecedented opportunities emerges.

I mentioned in the Introduction the 75 percent decline in return on assets that US public corporations have experienced over the past five decades. That trend provides compelling quantitative evidence that current approaches to scalable efficiency are no longer working and are leading to diminishing performance over time. Unmet needs are staying unmet; new ways to create value and accelerate performance improvement are not being deployed. Passionate workers are powerful catalysts for institutional transformation, whether they remain within the institution or serve outside its boundaries, operating on its peripheries in various roles.

Given the new infrastructures that are emerging, we have an unprecedented opportunity to engage in a new form of innovation: institutional innovation. Product and process innovation are still valuable, but they are inevitably limited in scope and potential as long as organizations pursue them within existing institutional arrangements.

To thrive and draw others into our camp, people with the passion of the explorer need to rethink whole institutional architectures—the roles and relationships that define how institutions function. Instead of pursuing scalable efficiency, institutions must learn how to pursue scalable learning. In other words, they must make talent development and performance improvement (getting better faster) the core rationale for their existence. Everything about these institutions—strategy, operations, and organization—must be reconceived through this talent development lens. As these efforts to craft a new set of institutional arrangements advance, we passionate explorers will move from the edges of institutions to their cores.

To be clear, when I refer to scalable learning, I am not talking about learning as a process of sharing existing knowledge. The most valuable form of learning is the creation of new knowledge. The best way to pursue it is through action, so you can observe the impact and learn through objective experience. What matters is impact. The best way to address unseen problems and opportunities for value creation is to mobilize small but diverse groups that are committed to accelerating impact. This requires a very different form of organization.

Shifting from an institutional model of scalable efficiency to one driven by scalable learning will require grueling efforts. If we don’t undertake them, the scope of our learning and our impact will be constrained. Properly configured, institutions can provide extraordinary platforms to amplify and accelerate our individual efforts. We can still make a difference without them, but it will be far more contained.

Our existing institutions are largely helpless to participate in the growth opportunities emerging at their edges, where unmet needs and emerging new technologies create unexploited opportunities. Yet they must redeploy more and more of their resources from their cores into those unexplored white spaces on the edges of their enterprises if they are going to survive. We can lead them, from the outside in.

The initiatives we develop on those edges may take many forms. Some may address the needs of a small but rapidly growing segment of customers who could ultimately dominate the market. Some may address a broader set of emerging needs of a larger set of existing customers. Some will be driven by the emergence of new technologies that enable creation of far more value at much lower cost.

To drive the transformation of the institution, these efforts must have the potential to scale to the point where they become the organization’s new core, rather than simply being a set of diversification or growth initiatives. And to achieve the potential of transforming the core, the initiative to scale the edge must gain the support of at least one very senior executive, ideally the CEO or someone who reports to the CEO. That senior executive will need to have the commitment and courage to resist efforts to squash the edge initiative and preserve the core as it is.

The people at the edges will be more receptive to the necessary changes and will be the first to master the new practices that will drive those changes. Many of us may be using the new practices already, albeit in a limited and fragmented way. As we continue to engage on the edge, we will be applying these techniques in much more systematic and creative ways. Our growing impact will position us to draw more and more resources out of the core. New institutional forms will evolve and scale rapidly, enhanced by a new set of individual practices that make passionate workers even more successful.

To accomplish all of this, we explorers will need to find each other and join forces to expand our impact. The march ahead of us will be long and hard, but all we have to lose are our institutional chains. The path is clear: we have the opportunity to move from passion to profession and finally potential.

To achieve this, we need all the leverage we can mobilize. New developments like the Creative Commons, open-source software, innovative approaches to motorcycle design in China, and the impact groups that drive performance in extreme sports are early indicators of the opportunities ahead. But imagine what could be accomplished if we mobilized the vast resources already residing within our existing institutions.

We need to move forward and engage them, and those institutions need to listen to us. Twentieth-century institutions are not succeeding in the twenty-first century as new digital infrastructures take hold. They must change, or they will slowly shrink into shadows of what they once were.

Make no mistake, the institutions will marshal significant resistance to each and all of the fundamental changes they must make. I have long warned my clients of the power of the immune systems within large institutions. The antibodies they can martial are deadly efficient—and it’s no wonder, since people’s livelihoods, ways of life, and identities are at stake. Their reactions are understandable; these are well-intentioned people who believe they are doing the right thing. Nevertheless, they are ultimately driven by fear and must not be allowed to prevail. Instead, we need to find ways to overcome their fear and move them to hope and excitement.

We must remember that fear feeds fear. A burning-platform message (“If we don’t change, we’ll all die!”) just feeds the fear and hence the dysfunction. The more frightened people are, the more desperately they’ll hang onto what made them successful in the past, and the harder they will resist any efforts to change. Ultimately, however, what motivates people to embrace risk and pursue really big opportunities is not fear but hope and excitement.

With the right effort, we can turn our institutions from prisons to powerful learning platforms and achieve the potential we have long dreamed about, both for ourselves as individuals and for the institutions that support us. Once we have done this, we will finally have aligned passion and profession at scale.

INSTITUTIONS BENEFIT AS WELL

Throughout most of this chapter, I have focused on our needs as individuals. Individuals can achieve much greater impact in the domains that excite them when they can devote more time to them, and they are likely to be much more successful in their work if they are truly passionate about it.

But individuals aren’t the only beneficiaries. Imagine what our institutions could accomplish if all their people were driven to continually increase their impact, instead of simply putting in the hours and collecting a paycheck. In this world of mounting performance pressure, institutions that cultivate passion gain significant competitive advantages.

Although few institutions are tracking the passion of their employees, much less seeking ways to cultivate it, this can change. One of my favorite examples of a company that worked to unleash its employees’ passion is Toyota, which redefined the work of its assembly line workers. It told them they had some routine tasks they had to do—they were on an assembly line, after all—but their real job was to identify the problems that emerged in the course of their work and then not just file problem reports, but immediately fix the problem they spotted. If they couldn’t fix a problem themselves, they were to pull a cord next to their workstation, and the company would swarm them with a team of experts. They would be heroes for finding a problem that needed to be addressed.

Passion levels of workers on the assembly line soared, because instead of just doing routine tasks that anyone could do, they were identifying opportunities to become more productive and achieve more and more impact. While certainly not everyone could become passionate about working on an automobile assembly line, this example suggests that institutions can redefine work in ways that draw out more potential from their employees, and in doing so, they benefit their bottom lines. Sadly, the opportunity is mostly untapped.

BOTTOM LINE

Once we have discovered our passion of the explorer, we need to align it with our work. While we can try to do that individually, we’re likely to have much greater impact if we work together to transform our institutions, leading them from the edges. This is not just an imperative that we should pursue out of fear, but a huge opportunity.

Here are some questions to consider:

•   If you have discovered your passion of the explorer:

   Is your job providing you with an opportunity to pursue this passion at work? If so:

   Have you been able to connect with others at work who share your passion of the explorer?

   Is there anything you can do to help transform the institution you work for so it can cultivate your passion more effectively?

   If your job is not providing an opportunity to pursue this passion:

   Are there ways you can evolve your job so that it focuses more on your passion?

   Are there other job opportunities within the institution that would be more aligned with your passion?

   Is there anything you can do to help transform the institution you work for so it can cultivate the passion of the explorer more effectively?

   Would you be better able to pursue your passion by finding another institution to work for or perhaps even launching a startup?

•   If you have not yet discovered your passion of the explorer, are you aggressively searching to find that passion, as discussed in the previous chapter?