Updated Oct 10, 2008 – Nirmala, a KM professional joined the conversation with several insights on her blog. Thanks for the link Nirmala.

Prolog:

Teaching passion is one of my favorite areas. I started thinking about this again because i felt we have not been able to package the superb discussion that this topic has generated. Lots of people contributed to the discussion, but the main sparks were – Larzini’s Viral Passion idea, Milind Sathe’s Trigger, Sujatha’s 3 categories of people, Priya Raju’s Big Picture , Ganesh’s Learnt Vs. Taught and finally Archana Raghuram’s passive passion.

That insightful comment of hers has been ringing in my head for a while now. A few days ago, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head.

3 levels of passion

Where does being passionate about something lead you? It makes you better in that chosen area and depending on the degree of passion you have, you can truly become a world-class expert in that area over time.   The light bulb moment occurred to me, when i realized the connection between expertise and passion.

1. No passion – you just like music or cricket or dance or whatever, but the liking is not strong enough to even be at the passive passion level. In this case, the expertise over time grows at a snail’s pace. This is the lower most trajectory in the diagram above.

2. Passionate Consumer - you are passionate about something – you have a strong/distinct liking for the topic. You start gaining expertise. This is the second trajectory in the middle. Expertise grows more rapidly over time compared to the no-passion category.  For instance, i am passionate about music, and due to that i know a bit about music. I could not call myself an expert, but i know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.

From Larzini’s comment, you can say that people that are virally passionate are also at this level. They are passionate about something, they do produce, but not yet that passionate – thanks to the infectious passion of the leader or a friend or a trigger or a powerful goal/vision.

3. Passionate Producer – You are so passionate about something, that you actually start producing/practicing. If you are passionate about paintings you start painting etc. The act of doing something/producing something that can either be self-critiqued or critiqued by others creates a powerful feedback loop in your brain pushing you to a greater and greater degree of excellence in that topic.  This is the third trajectory in the diagram above which shows expertise growing much more rapidly.

How to become passionate?

If you integrate all the 3 categories, you can see that exposure to new topics can help build passion, immersing yourself in that activity can increase the passion to the 2nd level and starting to produce can take the passion to the next level.

Ambition can provide the fuel for passion. In the corporate context, setting a powerful goal or creating a powerful vision can be that fuel to create viral passion. In all 3 levels, associating oneself with passionate people can have a great impact. Even if you are an expert, associating with other passionate experts can increase your expertise further.

A sense of competition can help create powerful goals/visions. As long as the competition is healthy, competition is a great driving force.

Although, technically you can become an expert in anything you choose to apply your passion to, making sure you have the aptitude for the topic, is important. Again a wide-ranging exposure may help you determine the things that you have the natural flair for.

Career

Recently we did some surveys inside our company and we found that passionate bloggers and passionate musicians (our Euphony band that i talked about) are top performers in the company. Once you are a passionate producer in something, that rubs off on everything you do including your job. If you look at it from another point of view, you have figured out how to build world class expertise. So you can apply that ability to gaine expertise to your career.  Career progresses when your expertise in the job improves.

If you are a leader, you can use this insight to make your team passionate about any type of producing activity (may not be business related) and then transfer that passion onto the company’s business. Aside from this, also explain the big picture, ambitious goals/vision to light the fire.

It is this fire that can launch the rocket ship as indicated in the diagram above.

Conclusion

In sum, passion can be taught, scratch that, it can be learnt. And once you are passionate, success follows.

Epilog:

I am sure there are some gaps in this. What do you think?

Notes & References:

1. The diagram above is an attempt to summarize this post – inspired by Kathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users.

2. How to become an expert

3. Why effort/practice is more important than talent.

4. Are you an expert? – Charlie Munger’s wisdom on the topic.

5. For a neuroscientific rationale for why feedback improves performance/expertise – ABC Theory.

6.  To be accurate, each of the 3 lines in the above diagram should be an S Curve. I chose straight lines for making the diagram simpler.

If you liked “Who moved my cheese”, you would probably enjoy “Our Iceberg Is Melting” as well. The author’s explain how change can be effected in an organization via the story of a group of penguins that is forced to relocate because their current iceberg of residence is melting. The story is about how a group of “leader” penguins determine if relocation is needed, and once the answer is determined to be a YES, form a team to come up with the plan to effect the change – which includes selling the need for the change (relocation) to larger penguin population, forming sub-teams to figure out the new location and associated logistics, motivating the teams on a constant basis to not lose focus and then aiding in the relocation. Once this is done the first time, the need to keep moving and find stable iceberg on a constant basis is enforced into the population, implying that the only thing that is constant is change itself.I did not feel that there was anything particularly eye-opening/new insights with respect to “Change Management” itself. It involves the typical –

1. Leaders need to determine if the particular change is actually needed. Collect and analyze appropriate data before buying into it
2. Once you think it is needed, form an appropriate team that can look at the facts and come up with a plan to effect the change
3. Lead (and do not necessarily coerce) the team to come up with the plan. Prod the teams at appropriate times to keep them focused at the task at hand. (This can be delegated as needed).
4. Next is the important task of selling the change to general population or team(s) affected. Change is always tough to digest and the purpose needs to be explained in a manner that appeals and makes sense to the population. If necessary dispose “change agents” to specific populations to communicate the change on a constant basis in a consistent manner.
5. Once there is buy-in from the general population, then the change needs to be effected by appropriate teams. All the while, the need for the change and the pain associated with it may have to be explained/re-enforced multiple times.
6. Of course, you would have to constantly evaluate how the plan is going and make adjustments as needed (not mentioned in the book)
7. Finally, prepare the population for future change(s)

Of course, there will be variations to the above process depending on the organization.

There were 2 important lessons related to “Change Management” that was re-enforced for me from this book. It is a very tentative/shy and inquisitive but not a leader penguin that determines something is wrong in the environment they are living and that iceberg in fact could be melting. The shy penguin brings this information up to one of the leader penguins that is known to be receptive to new information and does not pooh-pooh them. Here is what I got out of it –

1. One (and leaders in particular) has to have their eyes and ears open to suggestions from anyone in the organization.
2. If you feel that change is needed and is not in a position to affect it directly, understand the organization hierarchy, culture and personalities and use it as necessary to percolate information/data up the management chain. Always go with data that can be digested in an easy manner by the leaders which is easier said that done.

Ganesh

As someone brought up in Chennai, i have long been used to starting my day with The Hindu newspaper.  I don’t remember reading the newspaper much during my time at BITS, Pilani except for the occasional copy of the Hindustan Times . I guess,  somehow i couldn’t get myself to read other newspapers due to TheHindu disease which afflicts most Chennai-ites.

Sometime in the beginning of  1988, I reached Mumbai  and for the first time, I laid my hands on a copy of the Times of India newspaper and i should say it captivated me. What impressed me the most was the number of pages in it compared to relatively puny looking Hindu newspaper that i was familiar with.  I didn’t think much about the difference in size at that time, but that information was definitely filed away somewhere in my brain, i am sure.

Later in Dubai, I read the Khaleej Times and Gulf News and they were not as bulky as the Times of India. It is when I reached New Jersey in the year 1990 for my first stint in the USA, that the bulkiness of the newspaper really hit me – New York Times included as many as 3 big supplements on a sunday with a full fledged magazine thrown in. Even the local Star Ledger had lots of pages.

In my second stint in the USA from 1996 onwards, I was a subscriber of New York Times, St. Petersburg Times (when in Florida) and the Star Ledger when I was in NJ and the Wall Street Journal.

I could never get through the entire newspaper on any given day and especially on Sundays the task of reading the entire newspaper would be a marathon. I always used to wonder if anyone reads the entire newspaper and if not why does it have so many pages?

Okay, I am sure you are thinking – so what is the big deal about all this with the newspapers?

Recently, on our tour of Egypt, I had a chance to read the Egyptian Gazette – it was a puny newspaper with not more than 10 pages.

That is when the Aha moment struck me – is it possible that the bulkiness of the newspaper is an approximate indicator  of size of the economy?  Egyptian economy is not that strong. That would explain why Mumbai, India’s financial nerve center would have a big newspaper. Same explanation for the New York Times from New York, the world’s financial nerve center.  Same explanation for the relatively small size of the Hindu newspaper from Chennai which is not so economically powerful.  I also happened to notice that the Hindu newspaper has grown in number of pages reflecting the growth of the Chennai economy. Or maybe it is my imagination – looking for data to support my theory (called confirmation bias).

I did some Googling to see if anyone else has talked about this idea of the number of pages of a newspaper serving as an economic index. I couldn’t find any and again it could be my confirmation bias

I haven’t thought this through completely and I don’t have too much data to support my theory other than my own observations which is not more than a handful.

I also don’t know why there is such a correlation? What exactly influences the number of pages in the newspaper that connects it to the economy?  Is it advertising?

If any of you have any bright ideas either in support of or against this theory, please fire away your comments.

Some unsavory developments have happened at the client site where I took up Account Management for the first time in my career in 1996. I have kept in touch with my clients all these years and I got to hear about these developments directly from my clients. I am totally saddened by what happened. Unfortunately due to confidentiality issues, I can’t write more on this.

These conversations put me in nostalgia mode and brought back one of the key learnings that I had from one of my favorite clients – she calls her style “Subtle Leadership”. This post is a tribute to her.

The time I started at this client site, we were all called “contractors”. Now, this isn’t an unusual practice by itself. Even today external consultants are called contractors or vendors or something like that. The practice had evolved to such an extent that the identity cards were color coded and heck even the email address was tagged with a “c” to denote contractor. All contractors were excluded from team outings, many important meetings etc. Contractors were not given name plates to hang outside the cubicle. It wouldn’t be surprising if as a contractor you felt like an outcast.

It is in this milieu, that my favorite client practiced an entirely different approach. She invited all the contractors to all meetings, team meetings, addressed us as partners and treated us almost like any other employee. Guess what, our employees in this group worked harder, were more productive, came up with more creative ideas, jelled with each other as a team better. She invited our suggestions, implemented many of them.

In short, she got the best work out of us “contractors”. She did all this quietly without tooting her own horn – the hallmark of “subtle leadership”. Creating this sense of belonging, camaraderie and using that to drive better performance is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt in my life and I owe this to my client.

Now to the original subject of this post. Think about how one word Contractor vs. Partner makes such a big difference in performance. It is funny why more companies and leaders don’t understand this simple thing. As it is my fancy these days, I looked at the neuroscience of this. In my research I came across the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which postulated that there is a strong connection between language and your ability to think complex thoughts.

It remained a hypothesis and a hotly debated subject amongst scientists untill the discovery of a tribe in South America that speaks the Piraha Language. It turns out that this tribe has no words in their language for numbers greater than two – they simply use one, two and many. When they were adminstered quantitative ability tests as a part of the research they couldn’t handle numbers greater than two effectively.

It has also been shown now that people who can’t speak and hear are able to do better thinking if they have learnt the sign language. Such is the power of a single word – use them wisely. Have you all had any such experiences that demonstrate the power of langauge?

References:
1. Wikpedia entry for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

2. Wikipedia entry for the Piraha Language

Updated Sep 30, 2007: Dr. Frank makes a very interesting comment below about listening. He has a very interesting take on communication on his blog – communication is a dance which is a must read.

Okay, by now it must be clear to you all that I love this type of stuff. Stay with me. One of the first non-fiction books I read was “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. It is the type of book that fires up your imagination and opens up new vistas in your mind. It is a true self-help classic.

I still remember many examples from this book and that’s a big accomplishment for a book I read almost 20 years ago. Of all the things I read in the book, one incident he talked about has remained etched in my memory – Dale Carnegie spends 1 hour with someone and during that time he speaks only for 5 min and the rest of the time was spent listening to the other person. In the end the other person tells Dale that he is a great conversationalist.

If ever you wanted a great example of listening skills , this is the one. Because of how counter intuitive this is – you talk less and listen more and you are a better conversationalist – this lesson never leaves my mind. I have applied this lesson many times and I found that not only do I become a better conversationalist but I also tend to learn more. Recently, I met an entrepreneur for 1.5 hours. She wanted some advice on Knowledge Management and a mutual friend had arranged the meeting.

In the 1.5 hours, I spoke at best for maybe 10-12 minutes at the maximum. She was explaining about how she started and how she grew the company rapidly in a short time etc. I found her story really fascinating and inspiring as well. I finshed the meeting and came home. A few days later I heard from the mutual friend that the entrepreneur was very impressed with my knowledge and she found the session very helpful!

I experienced the Dale Carnegie Aha moment yet again and I thought I’ll share it with you. The reason behind this is (I think), most people want to talk and but are seldom listened to. In sum, if you want to be a great conversationalist, listening serves you better.

What are your experiences in this area? Do you agree?