Passion Fuels Excellence
July 21st, 2006 by HalOutgoing Industry Week Editor-in-Chief, Patricia Panchak has been writing about manufacturing excellence and lean manufacturing for 10 years. In Building A Passion For Manufacturing Excellence, her last column as Editor-in-Chief, Patricia says,
"Increasingly I'm convinced that it's the passion for manufacturing excellence… that separates the excellent from the merely very successful."
She goes on to explain that the love for what you are doing is responsible for the on-going never-ending drive to make business better. She describes how that occurs,
"(I)n successful manufacturing companies passion is palpable: when an executive talks about capturing new markets and increasing market share; when an engineer describes a new technology and the benefits it will deliver to her customer; when empowered, fully-engaged machine operators extol the results of a recent kaizen event and cite the time and money they've saved the plant, the company and the customer."
Passion is generated
I first read about this subject over 20 years ago in A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference, by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin. The book was hot for awhile mostly due to the blockbuster success of In Search of Excellence. But passion soon faded from any conversation about business. I think it's back. Just last week I was interviewing someone who said she wanted to reconnect to her passion when she takes a new position.
Patricia wonders in her essay about the elusive source of passion, then goes on to explain that she found her passion in conversations with manufacturing leaders. I suggest that ones passion is not to be found…from my experience passion is generated. Get excited about what you are doing. Show that excitement to others. Moods are contagious. The people on your team will start expressing their own passion. And as Tom Peters claims a passion for excellence is the leadership difference.
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July 21st, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Great post, Hal! I partially agree with your comment about passion being generated rather than found, but in my experience passion is self-generating and needs that initial spark to be fanned into flame. The spark is found; the flame is generated. I’ll occasionally ask people who are unhappy at their jobs what they want to be when they grow up. The ones who have the spark are those who can answer you without hesitation; the ones who have no passion to generate generally shrug and give a half-hearted “I dunno” and sulk off to be miserable for another day.
July 22nd, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Great post hal, and Tim — what a good analogy. We can actually rewire the human brain for passion that brings excellence … simply by doing what your interviewee plans to do with her next job.
Lots to think about here and lots to be concerned about in increasing number of jobs that have encourage too little passion from too many workers. What do you think?
July 27th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
I think that we routinely limit ourselves by holding back…by not fully expressing ourselves in whatever it is we are doing in the moment. If we only brought a little wonder to our work we wouldn’t be so darned indifferent at work.