“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
MY FATHER ONCE SAID that the genius of this country is contained in a few words in our Declaration of Independence: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The latter phrase was intriguing to him. It said that the Founding Fathers believed there should be more to life than just struggle. There should be bread, but roses too.
Being Irish he had certainly had his share of exposure to the dark and keening side of existence, so he was doubly impressed by his nation that was born with the audacity—the incredible optimism—to include that word “happiness” right there in its foundation principles.
“Happiness!” No one really knows what it is, but this country was founded on the conviction that it could be attained.
I have my own view of what happiness is in the context of a business career.
The old saying “Tell me what you love and I’ll tell you who you are” is true. Love has been around a long time. The word comes from the ancient Vedic, or Hindu, word of the Sanskrit “lubh,” meaning desire. A major component of happiness in the business world is finding something you love doing, whatever it might be, and then finding a way to do it. To have success you have to have a high level of unadulterated desire to get up and go to work.
Warren Buffett says, “I tap-dance to work every day.” That has been my philosophy as well.
It’s not that work has to be fun. That’s a misconception promoted by some of the more giddy human resources people who like to talk about team spirit and sing “Kumbaya.” Work, real work, is often very hard, exhausting at times. Rallying the troops (as Neville Isdell did in the Philippines) is not telling people to have more fun. It’s telling them to work harder because they are capable of doing better. They deserve, for their own self-satisfaction, to perform at a higher level. The hard work itself is what takes you tap-dancing into the office. It’s that passion to solve the problems of the day.
If you really want to fail, lose that passion for whatever it is you’re doing. Get that spring out of your step. Say to yourself, “That’s good enough.” Or “That’s not my job.” Or “I don’t care.” Or “I’m retiring soon anyway.”
We all know people who have done this. They are the gray-faced automatons found in every workplace—the people who seem to stew in their own misery, cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle. We all know them, and they are failures. Even if they manage to make a good living, they are failures because they have set such low expectations for themselves and everyone around them.
I have never met a successful person who did not express love for what he did and care about it passionately. I have never met a business leader or a political leader or a journalist or an artist or teacher or doctor, or anyone, who is really great at what he or she does who does not display a genuine passion for that work—so much so that if you ask them they’ll tell you they can’t imagine doing anything else. They seem almost a little crazy about it.
I know that in this age of careers that can span many jobs at many different companies the notion of passion seems antiquated. How can you be passionate about anything that is going to last only a few years, and then you’re going to move on to something else? What’s the point?
All the more reason why you have to be passionate.
At the outset I said that I had no surefire how-to formulas for success. And I don’t. But I do have a couple of bits of advice on how to develop passion for your job. I strongly believe it can be cultivated.
Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage.”
In his influential sociological work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman elaborated on Shakespeare’s observation, noting that whatever we do, we all have to be performers, in one way or another—and often in several changing roles. The store clerk performs for her customers. The waiter performs for his patrons. The lawyer performs for his clients, for the court, and/ or for his associates. The doctor performs for his patients and/or for his associates. The executive performs for his employees and/or his superiors.
To succeed in our various performances we have to strive to make an emotional connection with the audience, whoever that audience might be in a particular setting. You have to create, within yourself, an intense emotional drive for what you are doing at the time you are doing it. See yourself in your role. Understand what your role is at that moment.
In high school I was complaining about a boring subject. My mother said, “Donald, there is no such thing as a boring subject. What’s boring is your refusal to try to find what makes it interesting.”
Throughout my life, in many different situations in many different countries I’ve consciously worked to become interested in the immediate moment and make an emotional connection with the people involved. I’ve consciously tried to block out peripheral issues and noise and listen intently to the person I’d be dealing with—and find what makes his or her particular concern interesting. In just a few seconds I’d find that I could share their interest.
There have been many distasteful situations when I wished that I didn’t have to do a particular task that was facing me. But I would look at the situation and consciously think to myself, “What good can come out of this? What is the redeeming feature here? What is my role to bring it about?” And I’ve generally found something good because I was determined to do so. Even having to fire someone, which is probably the worst task one can face, I looked for ways to guide the person toward a more fruitful career or a more suitable company.
You have to be passionate about doing the job at hand to get the best results possible. The easiest way to develop an inner passion in a business setting is to focus all your mind and heart on four aspects of your world: your customers, your brands, your people, and, finally, your dreams.
Remind yourself every day as to just what the customer is looking for, expects, wants from your company. Is it a product? Is it a service? Is it an experience? Is it help, care, advice, expertise? Maybe it’s all of these. Maybe it’s different things for different customers. But constantly do your best to think like those people out there who are going to pay you for providing or doing something. It is so easy to lose sight of the customer, to think dispassionately about an amorphous mass called the market or a market segment.
There are, except as statistical abstractions, no such things as market segments. There are only people. They have faces. Visualize your audience. Visualize specific people and think hard about just what you’re going to do for them that day. For years I had a photograph in my office depicting a woman in her thirties pushing a loaded shopping cart while holding on to a crying three-year-old and with an anguished look on her face. The caption read “This is your consumer.”
With the Coca-Cola Foods Division and later with The Coca-Cola Company itself, I would often stop at a supermarket or a fast-food outlet and just listen to shoppers or patrons. Ad agencies would describe prototypical customers for us, giving us lots of statistical data on their preferences and their lifestyles. But from time to time I just needed to hear their voices. I just found it necessary to develop some emotional connection, some passionate attachment to those I wanted to serve. I wanted to care about that lady, that man, that family. I genuinely wanted them to have a pleasant experience with our products.
I fell in love with everything I ever sold. Next to Mickie, my children, and grandchildren, the most passionate relationship of my life involved the brands I was privileged to represent. It was Coca-Cola for decades and today it’s the Allen brand and Allen & Company.
And while I was not always successful, I wanted to further protect, strengthen, and enhance them. If they were new brands, I wanted to nurture them and build a strong platform for them.
A brand or a brand name is the most powerful force in business. Without it, you’re just dealing in commodities and anyone can come along and carve out a share of your business. But with a good brand you have a weapon to defend your business and a foundation on which to build the future. If you’re selling tissue, you’re just selling something that lots of people sell. But if you sell Kleenex, you have something special to offer.
There just is no substitute for the solid brand. This is driven home again and again in so many ways. In 2007, the power of the brand was demonstrated once more in a study run by Stanford. Ordinary and identical foods—milk, apple juice, and carrots—were given to individuals in separate packages. One package was wrapped in plain paper. The other was wrapped in the familiar McDonald’s golden arches package.
You, of course, could have anticipated the results. No matter what the food was, the individuals preferred the McDonald’s package. Even the carrots tasted better to them.
A brand is magic and it will thrive when it is in the hands of those who understand its magic and treat it with passionate care. A law firm becomes a brand. A hospital becomes a brand, and in a very real sense, the U.S.A. is a brand. Treated with love, a brand will stir passion among consumers, and, I might add, investors.
Treated badly, like Schlitz beer was, the brand and perhaps the whole company will just disappear.
It is said by many companies, “People are our most important asset.”
I’ve been fortunate to be a part of companies that actually took the wisdom of this cliché to heart. My current corporate home, Allen & Company, has a unique culture that, as Herbert Allen once described it, is “a welfare state for employees, and raw capitalism for the principals.” Under his highly effective management philosophy, staff employees are generously salaried and they often receive rich bonuses that in great years match their pay. Managing directors, however, have no safety nets. They earn a percentage of only the business that they are able to generate. This arrangement might not work well in all firms, but it seems to satisfy everyone at Allen & Company, and the loyalty rate reflects that fact. The Allen culture treats people as if they were truly our most important asset because they simply are.
Based on the evidence, however, not too many companies actually believe that. If they did, they would all make the Fortune list of best places to work, and they wouldn’t find their top talent drifting off to other firms.
I’ve mentioned one reason why people may leave a company—the bureaucracy stifles them.
Another reason they leave is that they simply don’t have anything to be passionate about. Towers Perrin, a recruiter, conducted a survey and found that more than 35 percent of employees worldwide described themselves as disengaged and disenchanted.
For good employees, while money and power are important, even more important is the opportunity to be a part of something that kindles a passionate fire of enthusiasm. There simply is no greater motivation than giving an employee a challenge that demands a deep, passionate involvement, requiring their best effort.
In 1907 Ernest Shackleton was trying to raise a crew to sail with him on his exploration of the South Pole. He took out an ad in the London Times that read: “Wanted. Men for hazardous journey. Low wages. Bitter cold. Long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in the event of success.” The next morning, so the story goes, more than five thousand men lined up outside the newspaper’s office hoping to be one of the few selected for the trip.
Most people have a strong desire—a passion—to achieve something worthwhile, even when the odds are against them. Give them a significant piece of the puzzle and they will try to solve it for you. In any business, if a worthwhile challenge is given to employees and presented with passionate enthusiasm and if they are shown how their own passionate dedication and talent can be applied to meet that challenge, in my experience a vital sense of excitement will flow like electricity throughout the business.
Passion in one area sparks passion in other areas. It is contagious and leads to new ideas and new energy.
Dreams do not come true by wishing, but if you internalize them and determine to grow into them and visualize them coming true, then there is a greater chance that they will be realized. We are all in what Teilhard de Chardin calls a state of “becoming.” He wrote about striving to reach the omega point, where the forces coalesce in our lives and we reach as close to perfection as we can. One always falls short, but it is the striving that counts.
Someday you will not be doing what you’re doing now. Think about your corner of the world at the moment, and think about how you’d like it to look when you move on.
Many people spend all their years and never learn this valuable lesson—there is more to life than having everything. As you go through your working life, in every job you do, decide that this is the last job you will ever have and, therefore, whatever the assignment determine you want to leave it better than you found it.
The Ten Commandments for Business Failure all come with my personal guarantee that if you follow them steadfastly and consistently, you will fail.
But Commandment Eleven is the most important of them all because passion is essential to continue and expand the American Dream. I have had the benefits of that dream all my life, and I hope that others will for generations to come.
Optimism and passion are the warp and the woof of the same fabric of leadership and social progress.
If you want to fail, you can ignore these psychological factors.
But if you want to succeed, then apply them to turning your corner of the world into a better place.
A word of caution: Don’t be afraid of the criticism that great enthusiasm and optimism sometimes engender among the cynical, the “realists.”
“Be realistic” is appropriate advice in some instances, but before you leap to accept it, ask yourself if being realistic is not just an easy way to discard a higher, more idealistic goal—a vision of something extraordinary perhaps that others around you do not yet see or understand.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.”
—George Bernard Shaw
THIS PLANET OF OURS with its more than six billion fallible human beings and with all its tragic flaws is still a marvelous place. Wherever one looks there is something that could stand a bit of improving. While many would argue, I’ve always believed that business is one of the key instruments for improving the opportunity for people around the globe. I’ve always believed that serving in the business community is more than a privilege. With it comes the responsibility to make things better than they are. In my fortunate life in the Coca-Cola business, I’ve seen vivid examples of that in every corner of the world.
Some sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine wrote: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”
If you want a better world for your children and grandchildren, believe! Believe that one individual can make a difference. And that individual can be you.
You will fail if you quit taking risks, are inflexible, isolated, assume infallibility, play the game close to the line, don’t take time to think, put all your faith in outside experts, love your bureaucracy, send mixed messages, and fear the future.
On the bright side, there is redemption. React in time, recognize the danger signs, and you can probably extricate yourself from one or even more of these traps. It’s hard for people and companies to avoid them some times. As I’ve confessed, the leaders of The Coca-Cola Company, including me, have been guilty of some of these failings from time to time. But never for very long. That’s the way it is with great companies and smart people. No matter what happens they are never mired in failure. They fall but always find ways to pick themselves up and move on.
“They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it anyway.”
—Gracie Allen