John Hagel on the Importance of Passion in Transforming our Economy and Culture

At this week's Business Innovation Factory 6 just after Rita J. King told a riveting story about Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds, John Hagel took the stage. Just earlier he had tweeted that he was going to tell us all a personal story. That personal story, it turns out, has profound global economic and cultural implications.

What he told us was something akin to a Sermon on the Mount for the collapse of the US industrial economy and the transformation of our global culture and economy.

Hagel began telling us how he spent most of his early life figuring out ways to get out of school so that he could experience the diverse cultures that he saw living abroad with his family. As a third grader in Venezuela Hagel forged his mother's signature and would spend his day exploring the slums of Caracas. What he discovered is that these villages were not places of hopeless people, but a place of energy and excitement. Many of the people in the slums had actively chosen to live there. Counter to the predominant narrative of slums being a place of despair, he noted that the people had moved in from the countryside to seek opportunity. He found the slums remarkably vibrant.

Of Scalable Potential and Possibility.

The main body of his story was about the notion of passion as a misunderstood, yet critical part of the human experience and, especially in these transformational economic times, the work experience.

Hagel described two personality iterations he and his team at the Center for the Edge have found in passionate people: The "True Believer" and the "Explorer." The "True Believer" is a person who has a profound conviction about their idea. He indicated that this is a common personality type among Silicon Valley start-ups.

The other passionate personality type is that of the "Explorer" -- a person who wants to pursue something and make a difference over time. He described the Explorer as having two core traits, a "questing" disposition and a "connecting" one. By questing, he illustrated that passionate explorers will find ways of connecting with people as they quest to solve their problems. (As a gamer, I found this particularly resonant.)

The passionate worker, he said, is twice as likely to have a questing disposition and is twice as connected as the person who lacks passion. This results in a sustained productivity in the work place and beyond.

The downside of this in today's United States: Only about 20% of the US workforce is passionate about their work. Conversely, the other 80% is not.

Further, the level of passion workers experience is inversely proportionate to the size of the institution.

Hagel described how we live in an institutional environment designed to squash passion. Not just our corporations, he says, but our school systems, our government institutions, all institutions. "We have created a group of institutions that were designed for scalable efficiency." Not for encouraging passion about work.

He offered a chilling statistic to that scalable efficiency: "Since 1965 Return on Assets for all US companies has collapsed by 75% ... It has been a sustained long-term deterioriation beyond any economic cycle ... And no evidence of it leveling off or turning around."

What Hagel thinks we need are institutions tailored to scalable peer-to-peer learning, not what they currently are focused on: Product, technology or breakthrough innovation.

When I interviewed for my first jobs, when asked by my potential employers what would set me apart as an employee, I always gave the same answer: "I'm passionate." I've worked in the private sector, non-profit sector, federal government, academia -- all the large scale institutions that John describes. And I think he's on to something critically important. When I looked around in each of these institutions during my years there, I noted with dismay the preponderance of people whose seemed crushed by a system, trudging to work with shoulders hunched over and head down. At one time these were people who saw potential in life. Possibly they were people who had passion.

John's thesis addresses what I think is the DNA of our cultural and organizational systemic failures. It has broader applications for transforming our global culture and economy. And we would all do well to listen.

The problems we are trying to fix in our society are not just about stimulating the economy, but stimulating the people.

John's story (as with all of the stories at BIF-6) is 15 minutes long. It's well worth the listen.

[John Hagel on Passion at Business Innovation Factory 6 (audio archive is on the right hand column).]

[More John Hagel on the importance of Passion from his blog.]

[Also listen to Rita J. King's story about Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds.]