We hope that you will have a great start for 2016! Start it off with a look at John Hagel’s “The Real Unemployment Innovation Challenge” article. He makes a couple of great points that hopefully will motivate more people to learn faster and have greater passion for their work.
Rather than viewing workers as expense items to be squeezed and cut as much as possible, we would finally see workers as resources capable of creating and delivering growing value. And this wouldn’t just be the case for “knowledge workers” – it would drive home that every worker is ultimately a knowledge worker, capable of driving accelerating performance improvement wherever they are in the organization by learning faster.
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We need to change that view of work.We need to find ways to more effectively integrate our passion with our work. Passion turns mounting performance pressure from a source of growing stress and burn-out to a source of excitement, driven by the potential to take our capabilities and impact to a new level. If we go to work simply to earn a paycheck, we will never learn as fast or improve our performance as rapidly as someone who is pursuing their passion.
Here’s the challenge. Based on research that I’ve led at the Center for the Edge, only 12% of the US workforce has what we call “the passion of the explorer” – the kind of passion that fosters rapid learning and performance improvement. That leaves 88% of us who have to find ways to more effectively integrate our passion with our work.
Have a Happy New Year and don’t forget to passionately pursue more rapid learning in 2016!