Passionate Purpose

As I thought about writing this post, I searched this site for the word “Passion”, and found I’d used it in at least 13 of the more than 70 posts I’ve put up here since I started blogging about a year ago. I guess that shows how important this theme is to me. This post then may simply be a variation on a theme, but, heck, Mozart wrote 12 variations on the theme of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, so…

An organisation without passionate leadership will fail.

In fact, having drafted this and several other blogs, I canvassed Facebook on which one to post up next, choosing just from the title, and they all said “Passionate Purpose”. As my good friend David Kirkaldy put it “Passion. Without that the rest would never exist or have any meaning.” Well said, David !

Now, I’d like to zero in on one particular business, Hotels. From my experience, Every hotel must have at least one leader with passion working on the property. No ifs, ands or buts.

What happens though, if that passionate leader moves on ? To both make your business great and keep it great you must spread the passion to all the staff, from top to bottom. That way the passion becomes ingrained and will succeed that one passionate leader.

Very few of the top 100 companies of 100 years ago, when measured by stock market value, still survive… but most of the top 100 brands are still with us. IBM isn’t a computer maker anymore, but a professional services firm full of “IBM’ers” with a distinct culture. Ritz Carlton doesn’t have staff, it has “Ladies and Gentlemen, serving Ladies and Gentlemen”.

Ingrained identity and brand personality is what has keeps leading companies focussed and on top.. or… Passionate Purpose. So…another lesson….

An organisation without Passionate Purpose will not survive

Back to Hotels, and let’s look at one Hotel in particular. Start with this quote :

“You can set standards for a hotel operation, but the standards need to be carried out by a team that wholeheartedly embraces them and has the ambition to excel in everything they do. We do not only want to meet guest expectations with our service, we want to exceed them every step of the way, and our team shares this philosophy.” - Karolin Troubetzkoy, Executive Director, Marketing and Operations, Jade Mountain, Saint Lucia

That’s the “organisational behaviour” way of expressing passion in running a hotel, but try this from Tripadvisor (see review on Jun 27, 2009) :

We were surrounded by passion – the owner/architect Nick Troubetzkoy, put his very soul into the design of Jade Mountain.

Ms Troubetzkoy emphasises the importance of their team having “the ambition to excel in everything they do” and that “our team shares this philosophy”, but boy that sounds like it comes from a management handbook.

Now, though, consider that Mr Troubetzkoy is a passionate guy who put his very soul into the design of the hotel.. NOW you’ve got something that the team can follow !