Passion management is about excitement and obviously passion. It is managing, in part, through the use of emotion. People do not leave their personalities and emotions in the car in the parking lot. They bring all of it to work. So why not use it?

Passion can be transmitted throughout the organization in many ways including email, newsletters, conference calls, videoconferences, etc. However, probably the most effective is interpersonal relations on a one-to-one basis. It is often easier to transmit emotion, feelings, and enthusiasm person-to-person. This may be in part why management by walking around can be effective.  Person-to-person also has the added benefit of helping establish trust relationships throughout the organization.

In passion management you attempt to get the staffs’ commitment based on their desires and what turns them on. Then you link it and align it with the overall company objectives.

Can you manage passion?

Given that passion is about emotion and feelings, two topics that rarely are in the same sentence as management and control, it begs the question, “Can you manage passion?”  This reminds me of Machiavelli in the book The Prince asking the young prince would he rather be beloved or feared. The prince falls in to the small trap and says beloved and then explains why using all of the obvious reason. But then Machiavelli tries to set him straight by saying that it is better to be feared. The reason being that the love of the people was an emotion and a situation that he could not control. However, he could control how much the people feared him.

Passion management is a bit like that. Emotion and passion tend to have a life of their own. As a manager you may be able to monitor it, perhaps steer it a bit, but probably not manage it. As a result it is a high-risk management technique, especially when executives feel threatened by the fact that they cannot control the passion. However, it can be very effective in the correct situations.

So what then?

Ok given this, then how do you get higher level of commitment from your staff? First, make it a real adventure or a cause. Employees can see through ruses. Therefore, make the cause real. Use passion management to help instill passion throughout the organization. If you can reposition the work of your business so that it is seen as a cause, you will get the benefits I have just described, your products should be revolutionary to some degree anyway, if not you will not be successful in the marketplace.

Second, there is an added advantage if you can make the cause or adventure fun. People may work harder without additional incentives for work they like or find meaningful. Look at the number of volunteer, civic and social organizations. These are volunteer organizations that expect and get tremendous effort from their membership, without pay. A sense of satisfaction and fun can make the difference. Fun is contagious. People having fun, tend to spread fun, which just helps reinforce the feeling. If volunteer organizations can get high levels of effort and commitment, you should be able to get at least some increased effort if you actually pay, don’t you think?

Third, as mentioned in a previously article increase the high leverage activity intensity. By reducing low leverage tasks, employed talents’ productivity goes up. Employed talent is more likely to maintain or increase their effort when they see that they are accomplishing something; a sense of completion can be a motivator.

Fourth, you can get higher levels of commitment and effort from you employees, if you have the right employees. This goes back to the importance of recruitment and the importance of fit. This point cannot be stressed enough. Additionally, having a company with a cause or adventure makes it an easier sale for the recruiter. People want to be involved in making a difference, a higher cause, etc. The best, most talented people often require something extra, this can be it, which will make the task of attracting and keeping the best even easier.

In the end passion management is just good leadership . . . ah do I miss it.

So creating a brand new you can be a significant value creating exercise. Budding entrepreneurs should build their brand around their product category or industry. By becoming an expert not only do you increase your access to resources, but you also increase your access to free media.

This quote should serve as a notice and a warning. While most strategic planning groups within firms spend much of their time researching and monitoring their competition, the greatest threats are probably not on their radar screens. Although it is important to know who your competitors are, increasingly it is becoming important to have an expanded view.  The purpose of this column is this: As knowledge of your market and industry becomes increasingly valuable, the value of acting like a traditional industry player wanes.

In this global and dynamic business environment knowledge is vital. This means not only knowledge of the business environment in general, but also specific information about your competitors as well. This knowledge is, in part, valuable because it will help you be able to predict, anticipate and/or preempt competitive moves. As a result, the field of corporate competitive intelligence is booming. However, the ability to predict what will happen in the market space is made easier, if you know who the market participants are, you know about past industry behavior and you know the industry rules.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it once was. In the widely used Porter Five Forces (Strategic) analysis, one of the forces that helps determine market structure is potential market entrants. The problem is that with converging technology and converging industries, it is often impossible to draw firm lines around the competitive space. Meaning it is difficult to determine who your competitor are and even more difficult to try to predict who future or potential market entrants will be. And as we read in Twain’s quote and can see for ourselves, the players that revolutionize industries, destroy the historic balance and have little regard for industry rules, are often times totally new upstarts, who do not know better.

These industry upstarts are often extremely effective because: 1. the industry competitors did not see them coming and 2. they were not bound by the old industry history, rules and practices. This, of course, makes them unpredictable and dangerous.

Therefore, the first lesson is: In your competitive intelligence efforts pay attention to converging technologies and converging industries. In addition, be aware of be market entrants and upstarts.

If your firm is a major industry player or a firm with significant industry experience, you must be especially cautious. Why? This is because there are unwritten rules and industry practices that most businesses in your industry follow including yours.  Also given that managers often move to other firms in the same industry during their careers, these rules, practices, and culture gets shared at an industry level. These industry recipes force and enforce certain standard business behavior. As a result, industries get stuck in ruts and decisions across firms are often quite similar. Furthermore, firm behavior industry wide becomes predictable.

Lesson two: Don’t be so predictable be so predictable. Don’t follow the norms of the industry. Although it is comfortable following the tried and true industy practices, it is acting outside your comfort zone that will lead to success. Learn from the new industry upstarts. Why make it easy for your competitions to predict your actions? If market share and above normal profits goes to firms that revolutionize the industry, why shouldn’t that be you? If you act traditionally, you will get j traditional results. If you act revolutionary . . . .

1. Let them procrastinate.
2. Stay off the top of their priority list.
3. Don’t build trust.

For the rest of the story :

Here is just a short clip of Gary. But go out read and see his stuff here and buy his book, Crush It.

Think about your day. How much time do you spend on productive work versus time consuming, time wasting and ultimately value destroying activities? How many necessary emails did you read? How many useful meetings did you go to this week? How much paperwork is on your desk? One way to put time on your side is to differentiate between high leverage and low leverage tasks. High leverage tasks are the core responsibilities of a given job. They tend to be the ones that are prominently listed in your job description. These also tend to be the activities that are more directly related to value creation. On the other hand, low leverage tasks are the ones that organization members spend the most time with, waste the most time with, and with which they have the most aggravation. These time wasting activities vary based on what your specific job is. For example for a secretary, clearing the meeting room of coffee cups, half eaten donuts and spilled tea, is a low leverage task for him or her, especially if the company has cleaning staff.

Getting his workforce to focus on high leverage activities is a major rallying point for Fred Smith, Founder, Federal Express (FedEx). He recognizes the tremendous power in this concept. How productive and how much value would be created for your firm, if everyone just did high leverage activities? For example, let’s assume that you spent two hours of your eight hours today doing high leverage activities. If you were able to increase it to the full eight hours, how much would you get done? Would you be 4 times more productive? I would venture to say that you would be more like 10 times more productive because you would be working in contiguous blocks, instead of 5 minute snippets. Furthermore, there is a momentum effect to work as well. Once you begin to work, focus, concentrate, you develop momentum. Now imagine what would happen if everyone in your company increased their productivity by 4 times or 10 times. It is almost too scary to think about. But why shouldn’t that be your company?

While the situation where each person is spending all of their time doing high leverage tasks may seem unlikely and perhaps unachievable, that should be your organization’s objective. There are several ways in which the organization can increase the percentage of time spent on high leverage jobs. The three most important are: delegate, redesign and outsource.

The first way to increase the high leverage content of a job is by delegating. While this may seem obvious, its practice is less so. Managers, especially in more traditional organizations, should be very familiar with delegation. The manager should simply delegate as much as possible of his or her low leverage activities to someone else. This does not mean the tasks should be delegated to just anyone. In fact, that would be counterproductive. The idea is to delegate your low leverage tasks to someone for which the task would be at best in their high leverage zone or at least very near. For example, if a company has a travel department, a manager or his secretary should not spend time handling the details of his trip to London. The travel staff should.

The second way is to redesign the job. It is possible that the way the job is currently formulated, includes too many low leverage or potentially low leverage activities. Here the answer may be to just extract many of the low leverage activities out of that job. In doing this you have a few options. One would be just to divide and reassign some of these activities to others. However an alternative choice may be even better. The low leverage activities removed, could be consolidated and packaged into a new job or function. In doing this they now become high leverage activities for those new persons. This way the tasks get the full attention of a dedicated person. Also the person could develop expertise and specialization that would allow the tasks to be accomplished in a productive manner.

Finally, some low leverage tasks can be outsourced. The growth of outsourcing is directly related to the desire of businesses to refocus their efforts on the tasks they believe are central to their mission or strategy. In this vein, low leverage tasks can often be bundled and outsourced. The first main advantage to this is that the success organization’s employees can be relieved of some low leverage activities thereby increasing their high leverage work intensity. Secondly, the newly outsourced activities will be handled by a firm whose expertise and focus (i.e., high leverage) are specifically those tasks. As a result productivity is enhanced and value is created.

So you want to start dramatically increasing the productivity of your day or that of your organization, start reducing the amount of time spent on low leverage activities and really start creating value.

How do you survive in your prison . . . I mean company?

It is important to note that requesting feedback often has negative effects, because it is typically handled improperly. If feedback is requested, the resulting feedback needs to be acknowledged. If the client takes the time to give feedback they deserve an acknowledgement. They further need to be told what happened to their feedback. This means, whether or not, the feedback results in changes, the clients should be told the results. If the feedback was not used, it can be handled simply as a brief statement thanking them and stating that their suggestion could not be implemented at this time. The worse thing is when the client believes that his or her feedback was not of concern or not taken seriously.

A manager should be partially evaluated based on how well he or she serves their subordinates in their task to create value for the firm and customers. This will help reinforce the managerial culture of service. This is virtually the opposite of what is found in most businesses today. In those firms managers expect subordinates to serve them. But again the successful client is not concerned with what most firms do, because what other firms do is usually wrong.

You can’t phone in leadership.

Executives must get their hands dirty. It has to be demonstrative leadership. For example, Lars-Johan Jarnheimer is the CEO of Tele2, the Swedish based telecommunications growth firm. Since he took over in 1998 revenue had shoot up over 500% by 2002. Jarnheimer personally answers customer letters addressed to him. He even works the customer service phones in the call center a few days a year. A few days is all it takes. The other employees, especially the call center, see by example that the customer is so important that the CEO takes time out of his busy schedule to do it. It has the additional effect of helping to reinforce the customer-centered culture of the organization as well. Amazon founder/CEO Bezos also fields customer service calls occasionally.

London-based Pret A Manger, an upscale sandwich chain, has a public promise that if you don’t like the food you should call in to complain. Founder Julian Metcalf requires his switchboard to record all such calls. He returns every on personally. While legendary Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines used to work in the baggage department during the busy holiday travel season. Sonic Drive-In’s CEO Cliff Hudson requires his executives to spend at least half of their time in the fast food chains actual kitchens not only to understand the business from that base level but also to invent new menu items.

Meg Whitman, CEO of Internet giant eBay, requires each of her top executives to sell something on the eBay site every month. As a result not only does it make the executives customer-centered, it in fact, makes them actually customers. They no longer have to imagine how the customer feels. They no longer have to sympathize or even empathize with the customers. This is a perfect example of management both being customer-centered and demonstrative.

Demonstrative leadership has another important function. Management teams often do not have the respect or trust of their organizations. Trust is important for any organization including the opportunistic ones. Unfortunately, this trust is lost in many organizations by what I call hypocritical leadership. Hypocritical leadership, is when management says one thing, but does another. It is when top management exhorts the organization to behave in one way, but they continue to behave in another. But on the other hand, demonstrative leadership is when executives not only talk the talk, but walk the walk as well.

This serves a number of purposes. First, it shows that management is sincere. Second, it shows that top management sees itself as part of the organization, not above it. Finally, it can demonstrate how the management is supposed to work. All of these help engender trust and respect. When top management is directly and visibly involved, it makes it much easier to rally the troops and focus their attention on the tasks and objects in front of them.