"Forget the Knowledge Age, it's time to bring passionate commitment to work." - - Catherine Fox reports.
Pick up the latest management book and chances are you'll find the word "passion" sprinkled through its pages.
Finding passion for your work is now touted as a key to unlock major benefits for workers and employers. If only we could all find passion for what we do, then the working world would surely be a different place, according to this popular line of thought.
Author and consultant Charles Kovess believes he had something to do with giving passion its recent currency in management texts. He calls himself the passion provocateur, and has called his latest book Passionate Performance, a follow-up to his last title, Passionate People Produce.
Without passion, he says, organisations and their staff are lacking commitment and cannot hope for long-term success. And there are very few Australian organisations currently able to nurture commitment and passion in their staff.
According to Kovess, a lawyer and company director who now runs courses for business executives, a lack of people skills is the fundamental failing of Australian leadership and probably contributes to Australian corporations failing to provide high investor returns.
"Most business leaders in Australia have become leaders because of their technical expertise, not their leadership expertise," he says.
"Around 53 per cent of our CEOs come from an engineering background and many of them aren't good at leading people."
And that is a shame because Kovess believes we are fast moving from the Knowledge Age to the Passion Age. It's another way of saying people are your greatest asset, but Kovess wants to take it further. People are your only asset because without them there is no organisation.
"The keys are not technology, nor cash, nor buildings, nor plant and equipment. All of those assets are irrelevant, all of those are worth very little, without people who are committed to make use of those assets."
Kovess understands readers may be a tad cynical about his sentiments. After all. isn't it unrealistic to expect passion from workers who are not even sure if they will have a job next week, and have managers who are giving them stomach ulcers?
"It's certainly unrealistic. But if you take the word realistic, it means to behave like most people and most people aren't passionate about their work and most environments don't create the opportunity to be passionate.
"What the [book's] message is saying is if you behave like most people and you are realistic, the results will not be great."
That's why he wrote the book, Kovess says.
"I'm not saying for a moment this is easy, I don't want to be glib about this. There is a lot of pain attached to taking the risk in creating this sort of environment."
But slow change is occurring with the development of a 'collective consciousness' on issues relating to work, commitment and leadership.
"More and more people are leaving major companies and setting up their own businesses and providing their services to those corporates they have left. One of the reasons they are more mobile is that employers are not loyal to staff any more. If you worked for Telstra, you would be unrealistic to think your employer would be loyal," he says.
Kovess joins an increasing number of management experts in condemning the downsizing fad. He recommends more concentration on people and medium-term strategies rather than obsession with downsizing and cost- cutting. Cost-cutting will not create long-term success and "there is no evidence to suggest it does", Kovess says.
The rate at which CE0s are leaving their positions after a relatively short tenure is not helping organisations come to grips with the people issue. Nor is the pressure for quick results.
"The challenge for boards and leaders of publicly listed companies is to reject the pressure of short-term thinking by fund managers, many of them driven by young, highly educated and intelligent people, who demand quarterly results. "Such a focus on quarterly performance is quite ridiculous," he says. "These pressures must be rejected if sustainable, long-term success is sought."
The big problem for Australian business managers is that few have the courage to reject short term thinking and stand up for more people-oriented strategies. Some of this weakness has to do with our culture, with its "tall poppy" syndrome and a general lack of willingness to stand out from the crowd.
"They haven't got the guts to stand up to the fund managers' demand for 4uarterly performance," Kovess says. "It takes courage and it's the dominant thinking, and that's what is driving (Telstra chief executive) Ziggy Switkowski."
There is no denying that people are the difficult part of business, he adds. "That is why so few organisations successfully access the knowledge and wisdom of their people. The most certain way to sustainably generate superior investor returns is to master the difficult people issues and thereby contribute to the creation of a passionate working environment."
In his book, Kovess outlines a series of steps for creating a passionate workplace - such as defining purpose and goals, concentrating on teamwork, communication and trust, and balancing the need to keep fit and healthy.
And he says the message is not falling on deaf ears. "Every time I speak individually to business leaders, they say no, they don't want things to stay the same. There is an awareness we have to look after people."
Passionate Performance by Charles Kovess (Information Australia)
